Each year, twice a year, musicians flock to the Catskill Mountain hamlet of East Durham, New York, transforming this otherwise sleepy town into a bustling site of music, dancing, and parties. East Durham is home to multiple Irish cultural festivals a year, but two stand out for their focus on Irish traditional music: the Catskills Irish Arts Week and the Northeast Tionól. These festivals, affectionately referred to collectively as “the Catskills,” are curious in their allure. Sprawled across a three-mile stretch of rural highway, most festival facilities are rundown and date to the heyday of the region in the first half of the twentieth century, when East Durham was an enclave of Irish American resort vacationers. Dotting the side of the road are more vacant and dilapidated buildings than there are in use. Yet, musicians attend each year with fervor, citing both the difficulties of the location and its pleasurable potentials as core to the “Catskills” experience. Drawing upon ethnographic observations and interviews, I examine this affective ambivalence and how it is structured by sensory qualities unique to the physical geography and infrastructure of the Catskill Mountains. Though these sensory experiences are characterized with a negative valence, they generate positive musical experiences, creative production, and deep sociality. I argue that this affective transformation occurs because the sensational features of the Catskills provoke reflexive encounters among musicians that resonate with and amplify values central to Irish traditional music making.

In 2018, Barbra Streisand released her 36th studio recording, Walls. The album's songs, a mixture of originals and covers, focus on the cruelty of President Donald Trump. In orchestrating and celebrating a particular set of positive feelings—love, hope, and longing—Walls, like much of Streisand's work, is deeply sentimental. Understanding our current political crises, Walls asserts, is more an act of sympathy than intellect; we must “feel the tears” that have been cried. Using Walls as the focus, this essay explores the ways Streisand's sentimentality has always been intertwined with her political activism. This fusion is not unique to Streisand, and my essay here is intended to show how deeply rooted the connection between sentimentality and politics has been in US American cultural history. From its development as an independent philosophical idea in the eighteenth century, through its nineteenth century popularization via women-authored novels, sentimentality has always had a political valence as well as a racialized character. I trace this sentimental–political aesthetic, what Jennifer Williamson, Jennifer Larson, and Ashley Reed call the “sentimental mode,” through two key recordings from the 1960s and 1970s: “People” and “Evergreen.” I then turn to Walls, which uses music to instruct listeners in the affective identification with the suffering of others. However, in its focus on racial others—such as immigrants from the global South—Walls also brings with it the problematic racial legacy of sentimental politics where genuine concern for the downtrodden was mixed with essentialist ideas of racial identity and hierarchy.

In the Afro-Brazilian music-movement form capoeira, call and response saturates all interactions in live performance events (rodas). In addition to call-and-response song structures, music calls bodies into movement, bodies call to one another, and movements invoke responses from instrumentalists. Yet call and response does more than organize the roda. Demonstrating how antiphony organizes group sociality, the article argues that the music and movement also summon members to assume a range of responsibilities within the group and their lives. These include showing up for trainings and rodas, maintaining instruments, preparing for annual events, and teaching capoeira to younger generations in Bahia's underserved communities. Practitioners frame their ethical commitments to capoeira as compromisso, a concept that implies broad, long-term dedication. Grounding the study in my ethnographic research conducted in Brazil, I bridge Black music scholarship with ethical Africana philosophy to argue that capoeira practitioners use knowledge generated in their music-movement practice to conceive an ethics of compromisso. While the literature on Black musics across the Americas widely acknowledges call and response as a foundational musical mechanism, few ethnographic studies have delved more deeply into the social, ethical, and political potentials of antiphony. The article thus contributes to understandings of how Black music-dance practices generate ethical knowledge and practice through their sounds and movements. As capoeira's antiphony transcends the roda's space-time, it calls practitioners to assume an unending compromisso, making commitments that span generations to continually leverage capoeira's lessons to improve lives in Black communities of backland Bahia.