‘Darker than the Dungeon’: Music, Ambivalence, and the Carceral Subject

Music’s sanctioned role in the day-to-day running of the ‘late-modern’ prison is to ensure wellbeing and compliance of prisoners, with most regimes facilitating access to music through the form of radios, cd’s, and cassette players. As a result, music often comes tied to judgements by the regime about prisoners’ conduct, with incentive systems allowing the regime to confiscate earned possessions under certain conditions. In this way, the role of music in prison is often continuous with the mechanisms of carceral control, with its ‘humanising’ or ‘therapeutic’ effects being defined as a luxury to be earned through good behaviour and critical engagement with one’s moral and psychological treatment. By tracing the history of music during the birth of the modern prison in the nineteenth century, this paper asks how music became incorporated into the discourse and technology of the emerging carceral state. Drawing principally on the work of Michel Foucault, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between music and ‘the self’ as it is applied to carceral subjects. Foucault shows how the expansion of the carceral state at the end of the nineteenth century relied on the production of knowledge about the subject through the application of disciplinary techniques. By exploring the construction of the self through the discourse of music at the end of the eighteenth century and in the published works of carceral reformers at the end of the nineteenth century, this paper seeks to explore the role that music played within this period of carceral expansion. The discussion will focus on the ways in which music acts as a conduit for forms of carceral power through its relationship with the self.

In the mid-twentieth century the prison became a symbol of rebellion in popular culture with young people drawing on the sounds, language, and imagery of delinquency to experiment with forms of transgression. Elvis Presley's intermittent portrayal of Vince in Jailhouse Rock (1957) is descriptive of the fascination with teenage delinquency during the 1950s and 1960s [68]. Amid the hopeless cruelty which characterises the film's prison scenes, Vince learns to harness his talent for music from his cell-mate who teaches him to play guitar. Once released, Vince encounters numerous setbacks on his way to musical recognition but is eventually offered a break at a television studio to record his song 'Jailhouse Rock'. In this carnivalesque scene, the performers, dressed as prisoners, lurch sensuously across the stage, swinging on poles and leaning assertively over the set. Though the physicality of the performers is wild and exuberant, the lyrics reveal a more restrained dynamic to the scene, as a party organised by the prison warden.
The final verse of the song recounts an exchange between two prisoners. One suggests attempting to escape during the distraction of the party but is swiftly rebuked by the other who would rather 'stick around' and get his 'kicks' [68]. The jerking and animalistic dance of the performers conveys the embodied spontaneity of emotional relief, a dynamic which is structured through the symbolic relationship between music and the prison; freedom and constraint. This physical expression is carefully bounded in the text by the carceral regime, and ensures that the party is interpreted within the frame of an intense and hedonistic relief, rather than a meaningful act of resistance. In short, music is presented as a vehicle of momentary transcendence from the austerity of prison life. Johnny Cash's live recordings portray a similar use of this dynamic, visible most clearly in his careful management of relations between his live and televised audiences. In the final bars of 'Walk the Line' in the 1970 San Quentin recording [71], Cash calls out jokingly to a cameraman who is leaning over to get an angle, ''You better not bend over there with that camera like that…Man! You're in the wrong place to bend over! Don't you know it?''. Though a few of the prisoners clap in acknowledgement at what is clearly a reference to rape, the joke is met with a relatively cool response by the crowd. The response suggests that the joke was either misjudged or that it was not meant for the prisoners but for the audience at home instead.
Cash enunciates a debased portrayal of prison life by affirming all the common tropes of brutality and licentiousness that are commonly associated with prisoners. Brewing moonshine, 'don't drop the soap', tapping a tin cup against his microphone, Cash is verifying his presence within the prison, and deploys its symbolic repertoire expertly. In the 1968 recording of 'Folsom Prison Blues' [70], a song inspired by the film 'Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison', Cash portrays a desperate, 'born-bad' figure, who recalls how he ''shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die…''. This famous line which encapsulates the image of Johnny Cash and many of the themes of his music was made immortal when it was recorded in Cash's live show in Folsom Prison itself. When Cash sings this line, the audience seem to erupt with loud appreciation, marking one of the most electrifying moments in the album. However, in the master recordings of the concert, the cries of the audience were absent and had clearly been added in post-production [33]. 1 In these performances, both Presley and Cash deploy the semiotics of the prison to heighten the emotional dynamics. Rather than appealing to the shared humanity between his audiences, Cash instead reinforces the connection between the prisoners and their separation from normal society to elaborate his own 'outlaw' image. The prisoners are depicted as a continuity of the prison, a space of separation and depravity, and are subjugated to the punitive gaze of the domestic audience.
More recently, the critically acclaimed Shawshank Redemption [69] has portrayed a more equivocal view of carceral subjectivity by presenting music's relation to the indelible qualities of the self. In a notable scene, protagonist Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, finds himself in the possession of a collection of classical records. Perhaps out of resistance or longing, Dufresne locks himself in the warden's room and broadcasts Mozart's Letter Duet from The Marriage of Figaro via the prison intercom as the furious warden and his staff try to break down the door. The act is portrayed as a triumph of the aesthetic over the potent dehumanisation of the prison as the sound are shown to spread across the institution and into the weary ears of the prisoners.
Music, and particularly its non-linguistic character, is portrayed here as something more profound than a temporary release from suffering and monotony. Daniel Chua [40] reads the scene through the language of nineteenth century romanticism where music became a means of illustrating an idealised and irreducible form of subjectivity. By playing Mozart's complex and evocative piece, Dufresne enables a powerful inward connection to the 'timeless dimension of the self', allowing prisoners to access their incorruptible and essential humanity [40: 348]. Contrasted with the other examples, the representation of music in The Shawshank Redemption conveys a more hopeful view of the prisoner as someone whose essentially human character may be accessible through the power of music. These depictions give some sense of the potent and affective way in which music has been used to depict the prison and its inhabitants throughout the twentieth century. Though by no means exhaustive, these examples illustrate a consistency in the use of music as a way of communicating ideas about the nature or disposition of imprisoned subjects and provokes consideration as to the relationship between music and incarcerated bodies.
Music's sanctioned role in the day-to-day running of the 'late-modern' prison is to ensure wellbeing and compliance of prisoners with most regimes facilitating access to music through the form of radios, cd's, and cassette players [59]. As a result, music often comes tied to judgements by the regime about prisoners' conduct, with incentive systems allowing the regime to confiscate earned possessions, including music equipment, under certain conditions. In this way, the role of music in prison is often continuous with the mechanisms of carceral control, with its 'humanising' or 'therapeutic' effects being defined as a luxury to be earned through good behaviour and critical engagement with one's moral and psychological treatment [41,42]. By tracing the history of music during the birth of the modern prison in the nineteenth century, this paper asks how music became incorporated into the discourse and technology of the emerging carceral state.
Drawing principally on the work of Michel Foucault, this paper seeks to explore the relationship between music and 'the self' as it is applied to carceral subjects. As The Shawshank Redemption shows, music is frequently depicted as a reflection of a subjects essential constitution and allows claims to be made about the moral and biological make-up of 'the self'. Foucault shows how the expansion of the carceral state at the end of the nineteenth century relied on the production of knowledge about the subject through the application of disciplinary techniques. By exploring the construction of the self through the discourse of music at the end of the eighteenth century and in the published works of carceral reformers at the end of the nineteenth century, this paper seeks to explore the role that music played within this period of carceral expansion. The discussion will focus on the ways in which music acts as a conduit for forms of carceral power through its relationship with the self.

Sound, Music and Carceral Power
The transition from the public torture and executions of the seventeenth century in Europe and America to the dominance of the prison as the primary means of punishment in the nineteenth century is described by Foucault [9] as a shift in the underlying rationality of punishment. Contrasted against the blunt and destructive force of the scaffold, the prison represented a more attuned means of punishment, and one which cohered with both the political and economic objectives of the modern era. Though the immorality of 'the bloody code' was central to public debate, the argument for reform also called for more effective and rational forms of punishment [9: 79]. The full-scale adoption of the prison by the end of the nineteenth century was a gradual process in Europe and North America, and the penitentiary coexisted with various other forms of punishment [3].
Though practices of physical punishment persisted notably in the management of slaves [35] and transported convicts [6,36,53,58] well into the nineteenth century, for domestic populations punishment inflicted on the body was determined to be ineffective and outdated. Where the aim of spectacular punishment had been to affirm the retributive intent of the sovereign on the minds of spectators through the symbolic ritual of execution, the penitentiary which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, represented a drastic shift in both the mechanisms and goals of punishment.
Rather than relying on the minds of subjects to interpret the symbolism of the scaffold, the new models of punishment sought to intervene at the source of the subject's thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours. This shift was accompanied by a reorientation, within the human and penal sciences, towards the inner constitution of the subject. Out of the emerging human sciences a concept of human subjectivity which was accessible to the investigation and intervention of the emerging institutional landscape at the beginning of the nineteenth century coalesced around the idea of the soul. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism.  Foucault reflected in more detail on the processes by which the self is constituted in his later work, drawing a distinction between the 'technologies of power' characterised by the Prison and the Asylum, and 'technologies of the self', referring to individualised techniques of self-governance [10]. Here, Foucault is not concerned with 'the self' as any type of innate component of the human subject, but rather as a structure which is continually constituted by relations of knowledge and power to serve social, economic, political, and personal goals.
'Technologies of power', Foucault explains, define and regulate conduct, and submit subjects to certain processes whose ends are defined through an 'objectivizing of the subject' [10: 18]. The construction of a 'carceral subject' in relation to the goals of the prison at the end of the eighteenth century can be understood along these lines as ideas about the moral and behavioural proclivities of the subject became objectified through scientific discourse.
'Technologies of self' are referred to by Foucault as ideas and practices by which individuals can effect changes on their own ''bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being'' [10: 18], to achieve certain ends. Here Foucault draws on the religious practices of self-evaluation and confession, to describe how individuals configure themselves as objects of knowledge and intervention. The relation between these forms of 'technology' throughout the emergence of the Prison in the nineteenth century represents an important focus in this discussion and helps us explore the constitution of the carceral subject. As Foucault states, the technologies of power and self rarely function separately from each other though they are constituted by different mechanisms of alteration and 'modes of training' [10: 18].
Foucault's [9] account of 'the carceral' as a generalisation of regulatory strategies throughout the institutional landscape of the nineteenth century has provided a valuable model for understanding the increasingly fluid and ubiquitous character of social control in late-modernity [54]. Though the prison remains an important site for the study of carceral power, the 'carceral turn' has decentred this singular type of institution in favour of a more diffuse model of social control. Foucault's [9: 297] notion of the 'Carceral Archipelago' illustrates how the techniques, aims, and rationality of the prison were continuous with the other emerging social institutions at the end of the nineteenth century. It is described as an expansive network of social institutions whose interventions, evaluations, and punishments were carefully calibrated in order to leave no 'outside' to the scope of carceral power [9: 301]. 'Darker than the Dungeon': Music, Ambivalence, and the… 279 For Human Geographers, Foucault's work has paved the way for new spatial conceptions of confinement in late-modernity [12] and has enabled a greater sensitivity to the dynamics of mobility, politics, and emotion within carceral space [32,43,44,54,58]. Much of the work exploring the political dynamics between captor and captive can be considered as a response to the perceived overemphasis of the influence of carceral power over the individual within carceral space [4,32,41,45]. Foucault's description of power as constitutive of a vast and expansive network of social, political, and psychological relations often gives the impression of a total system of control in which subjects are rendered completely docile. In response, recent work around the field of Carceral Studies has sought to emphasise the contingency of institutional power by drawing on the 'tactics' [45] of resistance employed within them. By exploring the material [37], temporal [65], and spatial [25,38,55] dynamics of the prison, for instance, the austere and immovable image of the 'total institution' is supplanted by a more equivocal viewpoint based around the continual enactment of routines, relations, and flows. The shift in perspective has also placed the experience and agency of the captive in higher regard by portraying the systems of surveillance, control, and repression as existing within a wider context of meaning, perception, and power. The following sections will explore these ideas in more detail with relation to the use of music and sound within in carceral spaces.

Murmurs of Dissent
Imagine between three and four hundred men and some fifty or sixty women shut up day after day, week after week, and forbidden, under the severest pains and penalties, to open their lips, and then twice every seventh day being permitted to shout as loud as they please for five or six minutes; you can then form some conception of the noise that was made and the temptation there was to make it-some conception, and only some, for nobody who has not actually experienced it can form any exact idea of the intense longing, the almost frantic desire that tempts one to shout at the top of one's voice after three or fourth months' enforced silence. Quoted in Priestley [28: 94] Account from the chapel of a Victorian 'Silent' Prison Brandon Labelle's [22] work has explored the ways in which sound creates shared experiences of space and territory, describing ways in which sound coexists alongside other material and sensory agencies. His reflection on the enforcement of silence for prisoners within the earliest penitentiary regimes outlines the complex interplay of sound, meaning, and power that occurs when one supplies ''the signifying gesture of silence with ideological weight'' [22: 71]. While sounds and music can create forms of inclusion and belonging [19], the silence system describes one way in which the sonic register has been co-opted in the excise of carceral power.
More recently, the use of loud heavy-metal music as a means of torture for suspected terrorist detainees has been discussed by Suzanne Cusick [43,44] who, in similar terms, refers to the removal of 'acoustical agency' from subjects by soundproofing their cells. Referring to the use of padded cells during the nineteenth century, Labelle describes this affect as follows: …the padded cell is an acoustically dead space, where even the movements of one's own body is void of echo. A silent space that aims to protect the body, with the straitjacket that further separates the individual from his or her own corporeality, the padded cell confines the body even from itself. [22: 71] The psychological effects of being unable to perceive one's own voice against one's surroundings is described here as a deeply disorienting experience, and perhaps helps us to understand the part of the enthusiasm with which the prisoners took to their hymns in the opening quote of this section.
In his extensive report of the prisons of London, Mayhew [27: 166] was moved by the performance of the prisoners in the chapel at Pentonville after hearing the voices of hundreds of prisoners express their 'apparently unfeigned' devotion to God. The singing of hymns and psalms wasn't always as earnest, however, with some prisoners taking the rare opportunity of physical proximity to their fellow inmates to communicate. The raucous noise of the hymns could act as a cover for prisoners to communicate across the carefully separated booths in which they were seated without being detected. Others would implant their own words over those of the hymns to subvert the acoustical authority of the service [28].
Despite the greater opportunities presented by the chapel for acts of resistance and expression, the strict regulation of the institution often prevailed over the religious teaching. Hymns were sometimes banned [27: 94] and prisoners were frequently dragged out of the chapel and punished for their misbehaviour [27]. Indeed, while Labelle attributes the transition towards the more human Auburn system of prison management to the terrible psychological effects of the silence system, other accounts indicate that it was the difficulty in maintaining silence amongst the prisoners that also contributed to its substitution [28].
Hemsworth's [33] study of 'carceral soundscapes' has sought to explore the complex acoustical space of the prison to understand the impact it's auditory environment has on the emotional lives of prisoners. Drawing on Gallagher's figuration of sound as 'affect', Hemsworth characterises sonic forces as 'ambivalent', in that their operation consists of complex interactions that largely occur beyond the scope of human cognition. While Labelle's work explores ways in which sound creates forms of relation between people, Gallagher [48] has sought to conceptualise sound in ways which aren't based around human cognition.
Gallagher's theorisation of sounds as types of 'affect', or ''forces that move bodies'' [48: 2], orients our understanding towards the imperceptible and nonrepresentational features of the sonic register which participate in structuring certain spaces and feelings.
The 'affect' of sound on incarcerated subjects is shown to produce a multiplicity of feelings, outcomes, and potential forms of agency which extend beyond the scope of understanding on a strictly 'social' plane [23]. For Hemsworth, the 'carceral soundscape' is composed out of a diverse assemblage of sonic components and relationships between human and non-human agencies, implying a multiplicity of 'Darker than the Dungeon': Music, Ambivalence, and the… 281 potential affective outcomes. Understanding sound as 'ambivalent' is thus a way of situating the human actor within a wider auditory context and allowing the 'base level' [22] and materially determined aspects of an environment to be perceived as part of the dynamics of feeling and emotion. Developing on Cusick's [43,44] notion of 'acoustical agency', Tom Rice [38] explores how sound becomes an enabling feature of prison life, laying the basis for forms of embodied understanding about the carceral landscape through the sensitisation to the social and spatial environment. Rice's account describes a prisoner straining against the door of his cell to hear the tone of a prison officer's voice. While the sound announces a loss of physical agency, at the same time it also allows the prisoner to exercise 'acoustical agency' by interpreting it and extracting additional meaning.
Developing acoustical sensitivity to the sounds of the carceral environment is described by both Rice and Hemsworth as an important means of developing feelings of safety within the prison, and can be understood as an extension of the prisoner's agency. While the sonic register facilitates forms of surveillance [48], exclusion [22] and repression [43,44], both Hemsworth and Rice portray a more equivocal view of sound as something that can also enable prisoners to develop forms of knowledge and agency despite their physical and sensory constraint. While sound is understood to be an ambivalent force which operates in ways both perceptible and imperceptible to the human subject, it's place within the carceral space leads one naturally to consider the political relationships that constitute the institution.
Returning again to the description of the prison choir [28,49], we see how the discussion of music and sound in carceral space are closely linked, and how music can also be understood as a form of 'acoustical agency'. Perceiving music alongside sound has helped researchers interpret the role of music within the history of incarceration, and has produced vivid accounts of resistance and negotiation under the brutal conditions of slavery.
This approach is demonstrated in Danielle Skeehan's [64] auditory analysis of nineteenth century maritime literature which illustrates how music and sound was used by enslaved people to create alternative means of commonality and agency. Here descriptions of 'shouts', 'shrieks', 'screams', and 'moans', as described by contemporary accounts, are understood by Skeehan as a means for enslaved people to express the immediate brutality of their conditions. Gilroy [13] suggests, the nonrepresentational aspects of music is important here for understanding its significance to enslaved people since language and writing were forbidden on pain of death. For this reason, music and other forms of expressive, non-verbal, culture took on greater significance as a means of surviving the dehumanising conditions of enslavement.
Other accounts of transatlantic crossings on board slave vessels speak to the value of music as part of the strategies for resistance available to captives. Antonio Bly [39] refers to the use of prayers and chants by captives as a form of 'religious resistance', with the aim of invoking spiritual forces to harm their captors. Katrina Thompson's [35] encompassing account of the musical politics of slavery also outlines forms of resistance both on land and at sea with forms of subterfuge, solidarity, and agency being structured through collective musical practices.
'Work-songs' bear similarities to the forms of African musical practice which were observed in European accounts as early as the eighteenth century [8: 69]. These accounts describe a form of communal musical practice which accompanied the daily work of the enslaved people encountered throughout the African colonies. The improvised character of the work-songs seemed to function most fundamentally to distract the singers from the monotony and pain forced labour. A chosen lead would sing lines which were often improvised, and the other workers would sing a determined line in response. The lyrics were often expressive of the anguish of work and enslavement, but would also seek to be subversive, humorous, and even strategically flattering of their owners [Douglass in [8].
The tempo of the work-songs was determined by the labour, and the rhythm would assist individually, to allow the slaves to endure the emotional and physical anguish of their conditions [8: 170], and collectively, to regulate the pace of the group. Accounts indicate that the regulation of the pace of work played an important role in relation to the overseers who were eager to punish anyone caught falling behind. By assuming a collective pace, the work-song prevented against any individual being singled out for punishment and beaten [21, 11, 8: 30].
Returning to the contemporary space of incarceration, Rice and Hemsworth, refer to the significance of music as a means of managing the spatial and emotional dynamics of the prison. Rice, referring to the prevalence of audio technology in English prisons, suggests that perceived capacity for music to help manage frustration and anger means that it is often welcomed by prison officers. Music's role as part of the available strategies for coping with the anxiety and psychological hardship characteristic of late-modern imprisonment [42] was referred to in Hemsworth's account too, with respondents referring to the role that music afforded in reconfiguring the prison space to offer forms of 'solace' and privacy [33,49]. Music's potential for the management of spatial environments extends beyond a prisoner's immediate space and provides a stimulus for imagining spaces beyond the prison walls as a strategy for relaxation or escapism [25,33,49]. Music also offers a way of considering the prison as continuous with the outside world in various respects, by helping to maintain forms of identity and relatedness [3,38,49,60]. SpearIt_ [60], in particular, has documented how the prevalence of Islamic Hip-Hop in the US prison system has enabled forms of relation between the often highly segregated lines of race by establishing non-racialised forms of identity for prisoners through music.
This intersection of music and space is documented in Tia DeNora's [7] influential study of music in daily-life. Supporting Rice's [59] assertion, one of DeNora's respondents refers to the use of music as a way of managing anger and stress. By playing music perceived to be loud and aggressive in an enclosed space the respondent was able to manage her feelings of disempowerment by filling the room with her own music. In this way music can be considered as an imagined extension of the body. Acting as a ''simulacrum for a behavioural impulse'' [7: 56], music facilitates the controlled transition from undesirable emotional states.
According to DeNora, music permits individuals to develop types of knowledge about their emotional constitution by identifying patterns of response to configurations of musical practice. By deploying affective strategies such as those outlined above, individuals constitute themselves as objects of knowledge. Music is used to constitute the self, acting as a binding through which knowledge, memory, and relations are held together within the subject.
…music simultaneously helps to recapture or construct a sense of the capacity within which one once acted (one's aesthetic agency); in so doing, it helps dramatize to [the] self a set of heightened life experiences. Through this vicarious review of past experience, this stock-taking of 'who one is' of 'where, interpersonally, one has been', one registers one's self to one's self as an object of self-knowledge, in the aesthetic construction that is memory. [7: 64-65] Crucially, DeNora's approach to the study of music rejects the interrogation of 'music itself', as a discrete form of cultural agency, and instead treats music as a form of 'cultural material' which is used in various ways to manage and construct social life. As the earlier examples of sounds in carceral spaces show, music's sonic qualities afford it certain utility under these circumstances. In the example outlined by Rice, for instance, being able to convey information in instances where other sensory stimuli are constrained is one way in which the fluidity of sound and music can be used to achieve certain ends. For DeNora, however, the significance of music goes beyond its sonic qualities and into its unique relationship to the emotional lives of subjects. Drawing on Foucault's [10] term, DeNora characterises these emotional strategies as 'Technologies of the Self''. As outlined above, music is used as a tool for objectifying the self, making it knowable, and amenable to strategies of self maintenance and management.
This section has sought to present some ways in which music and sound interact with and constitute the political dynamics of carceral space. Hemsworth suggests that the constitution of carceral space through sound produces ''a sonics of both suffering and survival'' [50, 51: 90]. Sound's ultimately ambivalent ontological properties mean that it falls on both side of the political divide, enabling and disadvantaging both captive and captor-though not necessarily in equal measure. Rice [59] speaks of music in this way too, suggesting how the playing of loud music, while empowering for those with access to the audio technology, would disturb and antagonise others who were unable to escape it. Cusick's work, alongside that of Thompson [35] and Maddox [53], also shows how music also operates to supress and coerce individuals, evidencing a type of political ambivalence not reflected in most accounts.
While the research outlined above provides valuable insight into the experience and manifestation of carceral space through the use of sound and music, this focus on carceral space and the largely acoustic qualities of music has underplayed the role of the carceral regime in determining where, how, and under what conditions music is present within the institution.
While the move towards 'situated' accounts of music such as those of DeNora [7], Roy and Dowd [31], Hemsworth [51], and Rice [59] continue to provide valuable insight into the ways music is used and experienced, these accounts make little comment on the role of music within the symbolic and discursive space of the prison.
A consistent feature of prison research [10,16,32,34,41] has been to explore the way institutional definitions and discourses exercise power over subjects and, in turn, how these meanings are received and contested. In the accounts outlined in this section, the focus on music's sonic components has obscured its interplay within the discursive aspects of the prison.
As Hudson [63] notes, the question of music's social composition as something distinct from 'sound' has been a matter of continuous contention within the sociology of music. DeNora's approach seeks to move music away from its conception as a discrete cultural object whose 'social significance' conveys a consistent form of agency towards a more ambivalent form, characterised by the sum of its relations when deployed in a given social scenario. Drawing on Roy and Dowd's [31] notion of 'musicking', DeNora speaks of 'music in action'-best studied when applied by individuals as forms of musical practice.
Hesmondhalgh [19] has criticised what he defines as 'intersubjective' approaches such as DeNora's for over-emphasising the enabling features of music whilst being unable to account for ''constrained agency, [or] the ways in which social and psychological dynamics might limit people's freedom to act'' [19: 40]. While, as the following section will show, DeNora's approach is able to conceptualise forms of constraint, the accounts outlined in this section suggest that the study of music in carceral space does paint a largely empowering perspective. To redress this balance, the following sections will seek to explore the history of music through the discourse of the carceral institution. The aim is not to disregard music as a form of agency for incarcerated subjects but to provide a fuller account of the carceral institution by exploring the journey that music has made within it.
The section begins by exploring the application of music as a 'discourse of power' by reading the historical work of Katrina Thompson [35] through Foucault's [9] work around carceral power and the subject. Thompson's detailed and encompassing history of the politics of music and dance within the system of north America slavery demonstrates how music can operate as a means of objectification and carceral control. The section will conclude by further exploring the construction of carceral subjectivities through the musical discourse of morality and the self at the end of the eighteenth century.

''Good Health, Good Thought, and Good Humour'' 2
Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work. A silent slave is not liked by masters or overseers…In all the songs of the slaves, there was ever some expression of praise of the great house farm; something which would flatter the pride of the owner, and possibly, draw a favourable glance from him. Frederick Douglass quoted in [8] While, as the previous section showed, music afforded enslaved people certain tactical and affective forms of agency, its presence on the plantations was dependent ultimately on the will of the slave owners. As the quote above shows, music existed within a continuum of meaning beyond that which was necessarily intended by those who produced it.
At work, music was thought to be beneficial to the productivity of the enslaved people, and as Douglass' quote implies, it assured the captors of the slaves both obedience and fitness. The role of music in regulating the pace of labour was integrated into a discourse of labour management as demonstrated in 'Agricola' [quoted in 8], a manual published for slave owners: ''When at work I have no objection to their whistling or singing some lively tune, but no drawling tunes are allowed in the field, for their motions are almost certain to keep time with the music.'' [emphasis in original [8: 162] Music quickly became integrated into the body of knowledge collected and circulated by slave owners, extending oversight on both the productivity and emotional comportment of the captive population. Another article entitled ''On the Moral Discipline and Treatment of Slaves'' suggested that allowing access to music and encouraging performance during the slaves' free time would lead them to a ''path of pleasantness'' [Herbemont in [35: 80].
Music also had a more direct economic function for slave owners beyond ensuring productivity of the enslaved people as musical proficiency became part of their commodity value. The purchase of musically skilled slaves was inidcative of wealth and status amongst slave owners [35: 83]. Rather than simply being tolerated, music and dance were often actively encouraged on plantations, with owners often entertaining their guests by organising performances wherein enslaved people were forced to dance [35: 70].
Perhaps the most fundamentally advantage for slave owners in encouraging the performance of music amongst their captives was in extending the scope of carceral oversight further into their private lives. While music and dance were portrayed as joyful and relaxing activities, their reconstruction within the institutional framework of plantation allowed for forms of surveillance, coercion, and 'objectivization'.
As Thompson demonstrates, the integration of music into the discourse of racial subjectivity and slave management came to underpin the scientific and ideological justification for the continued enslavement of blacks. To coerce enslaved people into pseudo-public performances at work and on the stage allowed slave owners to claim that the harsh and often fatal labour which enslaved people were forced to perform was satisfactory to them [35: 84]. Music was used to construct a racialized subject whose 'innate' competency in music and dance conveyed an essentially 'cheerful' disposition to slavery; as long as good conditions were maintained and music was made abundant.
The body of the enslaved subject was in this way made knowable through the attribution of an essential aptitude for musical performance. The 'singing slave' became a kind of normative category amongst slave owners who would judge the efficacy of their work, in part, through the sounds of their enslaved workers. This system of evaluation was not only based on the false assertion that the singing of slaves indicated their contentment rather than their anguish, but also ignored the concerted efforts of slavers to encourage and coerce the enslaved population into musical performance [8: 161, [35: 73]. As arguments for the abolition of slavery began to emerge in force towards the end of the seventeenth century, the argument that the institution served a parochial role in shielding an intellectually and morally inferior race from the complexities of the civilised world relied, in part, on this constructed image of the slave singing happily at work.
Music was thus applied as part of a 'technology of power' [10], legitimising the physical coercion and subjugation of slaves by providing a means of elaborating the 'carceral subjectivity' of the enslaved body. As suggested above by DeNora [7], music's relation to the internal life of the subject allows us to consider and reflect on the inner constitution of the self, creating a system of reflection and evaluation. DeNora's characterisation of music as a 'technology of the self' is developed out of her study of these evaluative strategies as deployed by individuals on their own selves. However, as Thompson's work indicates, music's capacity to reveal forms of knowledge and truth about the human subject can also be applied to others, and in the case of enslaved people, used to objectify them.
This section has sought to demonstrate how music acts as way of both constituting and acting upon the carceral subject. A key claim here is that music acts a way of making the self open to systems of evaluation and regulation by its association with the essential components of the human subject. Music renders the internal, external and thus facilitates the construction of particular forms of knowledge. The following section will explore this process in more detail by exploring the discourse around music, morality, and the self in the eighteenth century. The aim of this section will be to explore how music became constituted as a discourse of the self during this era and to reflect on how this might have influenced the work of prison reformers and practitioners in the nineteenth century. The review of literature has been based principally around the work of Daniel Chua [5] with addition sources having been gathered through historical review.

Music as a Discourse of the Self
The renewed interest in the human soul by penal philosophers is mirrored in many respects by important shifts in Western music. The eighteenth century had seen remarkable advances in musical notation, the manufacturing of instruments, and in the system of harmony. These technological and scientific advancements occurred alongside the aesthetic achievements of Central European composers who were celebrated for their ability to express, through their art, the profundities of the modern condition. Along these lines, DeNora reflects on the increasing 'aestheticization' of the self during this early modern era ''as a strategy for preserving identity and social boundaries under anonymous and often crowded conditions of existence.'' [7: 51] As this section will demonstrate, the significance of music to the construction of the modern self derives from the proximity of the aesthetic to the scientific during the romantic period. This account provides a useful backdrop in understanding how music became integrated into the carceral project of the nineteenth century which will be discussed in the following sections.
Like the transition from spectacular punishment to the penitentiary, the 'Absolute music' of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century constituted a rejection of 'Darker than the Dungeon': Music, Ambivalence, and the… 287 representation and an embracement of the unitary relationship between the soul and its environment. The romantic desire for the purity of aesthetic sensation was coterminous with an empirical focus on the body and its senses, and this, in turn, influenced the way that the self was conceived during this era. Music provided more than just a backdrop to efforts to understand ''the ethical identity of the self'' [40: 343] as science and aesthetics were in many cases not bound by the institutional divisions we perceive today. Spurred on by the glorification of the individual and 'unitary' self [7: 46] at the heart of many Romantic projects, DeNora [46] describes the emergence of the 'artist-as-hero' trope in the late eighteenth century, encapsulated by the moody, and brilliant, figure of Beethoven. In this image, DeNora argues, resided the idea that certain bodies were able to produce 'transformative powers' through their music. Deriving in part from the cultural 'script' left behind by the healing practice of 'Mesmerism', Beethoven's combination of virtuosity and intellectual brilliance was interpreted through the same cultural lens as that which had given credibility to the charismatic healer's 'laying of hands'. This musical embodiment was enunciated through the depiction of Beethoven in the early nineteenth century in sculpture and portraits with a determined expression, flowing hair, and a large, masculine jaw 3 to convey the style of a Romantic hero.
Conceptualising the 'transformative powers' encountered through music, early Romantic philosophers turned away from the celestial world of harmonic unity towards the human body as a more grounded and empirical object. John Locke's influential An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [24] placed heavy emphasis on the sensory faculties of the human subject in his founding assertion that human knowledge was derived through experience of the world. The nervous system thus became a crucial mechanism for philosophers following the work of Locke and Hume [5: 117] as the mechanism through which all knowledge was made possible. As Chua describes, the human subject became understood through increasingly mechanistic language as an interdependent set of hard-wired components.
The body was likened to a musical instrument which contained within it memories and sensations. Some, including Diderot and Herder, pictured the body as a harpsichord whose keys contained the sensory repertoire of feelings which would resonate through the body when struck by external stimulus [5]. The immanent music of the body-its untouched inner resonance-was therefore a reflection of the subject's most authentic character. The emphasis on the non-linguistic and nonrepresentational qualities of 'absolute music' was an effort to resonate at this basic level of the self in an unmediated way, achieving not only an aesthetic, but crucially also a form of moral purity.
As emotion exists independently of Thought, so also does Music. But Music may be appropriately wedded to Thought. It is a mistake to suppose that the music itself always gains by being associated with words, or definite ideas of any sort. The words often gain a good deal, but the music is just as good without them. I do not mean to deny that images and thoughts are capable of exciting the deepest emotions; but they are inadequate to express the emotions they excite.
[Emphasis added 17: 27] This quote from Haweis illustrates how music's connection to the 'deepest' seat of emotion is perceived to have a more profound effect on the subject than its representational qualities. Music's value here is in being able to 'express' the soul, as the internal configuration of emotional and moral proclivities. The relationship between music, the subject, and its basic moral composition is thus mediated through the belief that music expresses the natural disposition of the subject. Music thus had the capacity to make the soul both visible, and amenable.
Art, through its perceived continuity with the laws of nature, was replacing theology in the eighteenth century as the primary interpreter of the universe. The ennobling and humanising qualities of the music in The Shawshank Redemption portray this Romantic view of 'absolute music', situating the subject as part of a universalised notion of humanity by reflecting its most pure and fundamental characteristics [40]. The moral character of the human subject was enunciated through 'absolute' music. Composers were like surgeons whose brilliance and skill allowed them to express the inner biological truths of the subject.
The 'absolute music' of the early romantic period spoke directly to the fractured modern soul, seeking, through the purity and precision of its expression, to reunite the individual with its authentic and natural self. Music came to enunciate the self in an important way during this era, providing an empirical basis for the exploration of the biological components of 'the self'. Between music and the body was perceived an inalterable truth whose evidence in the evocation of emotional responses was proof of a moral being beyond both consciousness and conduct.
Through the development of aesthetic theory, a new science and philosophy of the human subject emerged in the eighteenth century which claimed to understand the inner-workings of the human soul. Referring to the discussion at the end of the previous section, we see how this association between music and the self was constructed through a form of scientific discourse that defined the most essential and irreducible parts of the human subject as being amenable to, and expressible via, music. Within the discussion of music and the self today, there still remains the assertion that music produces a kind of truth about the subject through this interaction with its emotional and sensory components.
The following section looks at these ideas further within the language of reform throughout the nineteenth century and seeks to demonstrate how these ideas intersected with the emerging carceral project. The sources and accounts discussed below have been compiled through a systematic review of literature produced by nineteenth century penal reformers in Europe and America.
As we will see, the work of reformers played an important part in shaping and expanding the carceral state during the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries and their role as part of the implementation and design of carceral technologies indicates they are an important resource through which to explore the role of music within this movement. 'Darker than the Dungeon': Music, Ambivalence, and the… 289 The following section begins by exploring ways in which the discourse of the self, outlined in this section, came to determine a form of carceral subjectivity during the birth of the penitentiary.

Technology of Power
Urbanisation in the Northern States of America and Western Europe lead to an increase in property crime with members of the displaced urban poor resorting increasingly to theft for survival. For many of these relatively minor offences, the previous system, which had been based on a proportionality of violent offenders, seemed excessive in many cases, leading magistrates to acquit convicted offenders to avoid executing them [1,3,9]. Through calls for reform, the moral disposition of the subject was being increasingly portrayed as a factor of social circumstances and new measures for managing this problem came eventually in the form of the penitentiary.
The idea of the 'criminal class' which emerge in public discourse, placed emphasis on the social relations of criminals within the subterranean world of the urban poor. In this view, it was the association of morally corrupted individuals into organised criminal ventures that produced the most troubling instances of criminality [56]. As the criminal subject shifted alongside its social environment, the penitentiary offered a solution to these problems of economic displacement and perceived moral contagion. As the previous section suggests, the characterisation of the subject as a naturally moral being produced both the imperative to 'reclaim' the soul of the criminal and the means. As prison reformer Jonas Hanway wrote in 1775: The great father of the poor, the Lord of Nature, cannot applaud, much less reward the conduct of any of us who are not faithful to our trust, as stewards in dispensing his tenderness and compassion for mankind. Whether is respects the bodies, or souls of our fellow-creatures, charity is the condition required of us. Hanway [18: ii] While Hanway's language is characteristically religious, his suggestions as to the management of criminals are largely coherent with the scientific and philosophical discourse of morality at the time. Isolation was advocated above all else in Hanway's recommendations as a way of dispelling the risk of any further descent into immorality.
This spread of moral sentiment is conceptualised in the work of the British Empiricists who refer to the idea of 'sympathy' to describe the movement of sentiments through the social groups. Moral sentiments were seen as agencies which affect the emotional constitution of the subjects who meet it. Since sentiment is only felt via the nervous system it becomes an important means of explaining how immoral conduct could spread. Hanway's advocacy of cellular confinement thus sought to halt the spread of immoral sentiments within the prison population through the separation of inmates into individual cells. In this way those whose souls were deemed open to reclamation wouldn't be lead astray by 'evil communication' of those other prisoners who were perceived to be beyond reform [18: iii].
During the early decades of the penitentiary in Europe and America the format of carceral punishment involved isolation, hard labour, and moral and religious teaching. A key influence on these early institutions was Walnut Street jail which opened its penitentiary block in 1790. Walnut Street was the first to implement the Pennsylvania system of correction which, as mentioned above, ensured that prisoners were kept physically separate from each other at all costs. The regime even ensured that exercise and labour were undertaken in complete separation. The later developed Auburn system allowed prisoners to congregate during work but enforced strict rules of silence at all times and separation at night. As the century progressed, the practical benefits of the Auburn system begun to win out over the Pennsylvania system and characterised the carceral landscape of North America to a large extent.
Aside from the function of insulating the prisoner from immoral sentiments, isolation and silence were perceived as moral agencies which allowed the subject to reclaim from within themselves their innate moral character. Silent labour, as Foucault [9: 122] states, would not only instil in the subject the will to work on their release, but also functioned as vehicle for reflection. Religion played an important role in guiding the thoughts of prisoners during their time at a work and in their cells. Bibles were provided to prisoners and all were forced to attend weekly sermons in chapels, specially designed so that the congregation of prisoners wouldn't distract each other from the sermons.
The penitentiary was designed as a functional system, transforming both the mind and body of prisoner by appealing to their inner nature. Though some criminals were perceived to have strayed too far from their natural state, the penitentiary's design, regime, and ideological apparatus sought to reclaim the souls of those deemed salvageable.
Here, as outlined above, the chapel represented an important feature in the soundscape of the penitentiary and, furthermore, provides the first implementation of music as a component within the prison regime. Music was perceived as a valuable accompaniment to prayer, and a means of expressing devotion in a physical way [18]. In some instances, music was a way of assessing the moral development of the prisoners, again evidencing the veridictory qualities of music in the eyes of the early nineteenth century observers [27].
Music's role within the carceral space was set to change, however, in the middle of the nineteenth century as Europe's institutional landscape enabled new forms of disciplinary power to be deployed across society. It was the institutionalisation of music in the middle portion of the nineteenth century that shaped it into the disciplinary apparatus which we may recognise today. As Golding [15: 2] suggests, the question of music's place in both the academy and society was a pertinent question during the nineteenth century as domains of knowledge became increasingly specialised. While early Romantic intellectuals were able to blend art and science in seamless combination, the marketisation of music and its increased consumption by the middle classes meant that its status required more careful management by its academic custodians. However, music's configuration into the values of the carceral institution occurred most profoundly within the social reform movements of the nineteenth century.
The choral movement, emerging in the 1840s from figures such as Joseph Mainzer, John Hullah and John Curwen, represents an important moment for music within a reformist agenda. What is significant in the popularity and spread of choral societies throughout the nineteenth century is the use of a distinct set of techniques to organise and regulate the choirs and the proximity of these techniques to those of the prison [57].
As a principal proponent of the choral movement in England, John Hullah advocated for the educational benefits of singing, and in particular its benefits for the working classes. The choir engaged poor members of society in learning ''the dignity of labour and the blessings of self-restraint.'' [Quoted in 57] However, as Grant Olwage suggests, Hullah's interest in the working class may have derived from his first-hand experience with chartist radicals during his time as a special constable during the London riots of 1848. In a speech to the Society of Arts in 1854, Hullah presented his views as to the broad benefits of musical education to the working-classes for moral and intellectual improvement. He appealed to his audience to consider the benefits of music, not in the pursuit of excellence, but in the value of the pursuit itself. Like learning a foreign language, he claimed, music engendered 'mental discipline' in those who learned it [57: 9]. In his discussion on the church choir, Hullah [52] explains in exasperation how the disorganisation of the church choir inhibits its parishioners from participating in worship. He explains how the church choir resembled a differentiated mass of untrained units whose members often felt afraid of exposing their voices and singing out. Tellingly, his concern is not with the devotion of the choir, but with their functionality as part of an organised whole. As we will see, Hullah's approach was continuous with many of the disciplinary techniques that emerged in the prison in the nineteenth century and through the wider network of social institutions.
Owlage points to the development of the choral system from its application to the working-class communities in the United Kingdom through to the colonialised word where it was used by the British administration in regions such as South Africa to control colonial subjects in order to illustrate its fundamentally regulatory character.
The choir operated in a different way to that of the penitentiary chapel. Where the hymns sung as part of the religious services were aimed at guiding the reflections of prisoners, the disciplinary technique of the choir was based around the manipulation of the subject through its physical movements and expressions [9]. Like an army, the choir required that the individual be taught to operate as part of a greater whole to extract a greater, combined outcome. The subject was placed in a position of constant comparison with others, and minute details of their physicality such as their tone, intonation, and phrasing became open to the judgement of the choir leader. Through this system, power was able to operate on a new scale, targeting every feature of the body and soul, and mapping out as an infinitely malleable, mechanistic entity. Where the soul of the subject had been perceived of previously as the target of intervention for the moral reform of the subject, now the carceral gaze extended to the entire body and to the life of the subject. The 'generalization' of disciplinary techniques throughout society is therefore perceptible in the nature of music education and practice during the middle of the nineteenth century. Music again served as conduit through which the perception, judgement, and regulation of subjective conduct could flow. Rather than 'expressing' the inner truth of the soul, music became a way of rendering conduct open to judgement and alteration.
At the same time as Hullah's classes begun in 1840, Captain Alexander Maconochie, the superintendent of the Norfolk Island penal colony off the coast of Australia wrote his 'Memorandum on the Expediency of Cultivating a Taste for Music in Prisoners' [quoted in 53]. Maconochie was to become an influential figure in the field of prison reform in the nineteenth century and his implementation of music as part of a 'machinery of moral improvement' [53] provides more insight into the moulding of music technique of disciplinary power.
Maconochie's approach towards penal management stood firmly against the use of silence and separation for management of convicts and prisoners. Influenced by his experience in the navy, Maconochie's approach instead emphasised the value of social interaction between prisoners and his famous 'mark system' incentivised prisoners to build trusting relationships with each other. Before arriving on the island, Maconochie had bought out a shop's worth of sheet music and instruments and encouraged the performance of music amongst convicts on the grounds that it brought the men together and helped to form positive and productive relationships between them. His comparison between the military and the penal colony is telling of the sort of relationship that he hoped the corporate performance of music would engender. Though, as Maddox suggests [53], Maconochie couldn't have come into contact with Hullah's approach until much later, his use of music evidenced another early design for carceral management that operated through disciplinary power.
Maconochie viewed society as an organised whole whose rules and functions could be instilled in people through the correct system of training. His mark system individualised the process of punishment, allocating an account of 'marks' for each prisoner to be earned through labour and good behaviour. These could be spent on immediate luxuries or saved up in order to buy the prisoners freedom [6]. Here, in Maconochie's words, the aim was: to place [the prisoner's] fate in his own hands, to… train him, while yet in bondage, in those habits of prudent accumulation, postponing the gratification of present tastes and impulses to ulterior advantages, which after discharge will best preserve him from again falling Quoted in Maddox [53: 194] To acquire music required 'patience and perseverance' [53] and thus demonstrated to the subject the value of industry and delayed gratification. The practice of collective music making required the 'subordination' of the subject to an organised system of conduct and an attunement with its physical and sensory requirements.
Though Maconochie's ideas were never fully borne out during his lifetime, they were met favourably by politicians, and commentators in England and circulated widely, even being applied by Charles Dickens in his Girl's Reform School [6]. At the International Penitentiary Congress of London in 1872 [66], Maconochie explained his approach at Norfolk Island to an audience of practitioners and reformers from Europe and America. Though he didn't mention his ideas of music explicitly, the report made by the Enoch Wines of the America Prison Association shows how music was beginning to be integrated into the disciplinary mechanisms of prisons across Europe.
While the report provides accounts from the most progressive penal institutions, and can't be seen as representative of the general state of prisons at the time, the discussions between the delegates indicate the solidification of a disciplinary ideology of reform whose reach was designed to extend beyond the prison. Reformers advocated for the expansion of the 'machinery' of the penal system into differentiated institutions administering to a wider selection of social categories. Beginning with 'preventative institutions' for poor children, the scope of the disciplinary state would stretch through five different institutions whose disciplinary mechanisms would be attuned for different ages and types of criminal. Within these institutions a further series of iterations would be implemented throughout the course of the sentence, in response to the progress of the subject within the penal framework [66: 281]. Another telling area of consensus amongst the delegates is the matter of 'centralization' [66]. At the time of the conference, the penal landscape of Europe and America still largely resembled a patchwork of autonomous institutions whose design and operation would differ greatly. The delegates argued for greater standardisation across regimes… …to the end that all preventative, reformatory, and penal institutions of a state be moulded into one harmonious system; its parts mutually answering to and supporting each other, the whole animated by the same spirit, aiming at the same objects, and subject to the same control, yet without the loss of the advantages of voluntary aid… [66: 275] The discussions recorded at this conference portrayed the scope of ambitions held by penal reformers at this time. The power of the disciplinary techniques developed in and around the carceral institution were deemed to be increasingly valuable for the management of society as a whole. As disciplinary techniques spread throughout society through movements such as the choral society, so too was the prison becoming a more diversified entity with education becoming a principal mechanism of reform.
The discussion of music amongst penal reformers takes on a more secular tone in the latter half of the century. As musical practices were incorporated into disciplinary techniques, its place within the penal institution shifted away from the chapel and into the sphere of education. Echoing the contemporary status of music as a means of ensuring good conduct, it was reported that in all Austrian men's prisons ''instruction in vocal and instrumental music is given, but only as a reward of merit and to such prisoners as possess musical gifts'' [66: 57]. Though it still held on to its religious associations in some countries, across Europe, music was becoming something to be embodied, rather than reflected on. In almost all of the national reports presented by European delegates at the conference, musical instruction had been incorporated into the daily routine. Even where the institution enforced the teaching of sacred music, the disciplinary frame of the classroom still prevailed.
Though the United States was slower to incorporate education into its penal institutions, the spread of choral societies was within the purview of the American Prison Association.
At an earlier conference in New York, the discussion of music is presented under the heading of Moral and Religious education and demonstrates how music's disciplinary character was beginning to contest the religious language of the time. A member of the congress appeals to the representational value of religious music, and criticises a paper submitted to the congress for not advocating the use of strictly religious songs. Wines, a frequent advocate for the reformatory value of music, defends the paper and argues for the disciplinary value of music in producing the 'disposition to work'. His choice to paraphrase the English Bishop Beveridge is perhaps a way of negotiating the question of religion in music education: …he tells us ''that the same motion that his hand made on the instrument, the instrument made upon his heart; that the music and the song, while they calmed his spirits and refreshed his body, did, at the same time, fill his heart with pure and holy thoughts; that when the music sounded sweetest in his ears, truth flowed clearest in his mind; and that his soul became more harmonious by being accustomed so much to harmony, insomuch that the least jarring discords, either in notes or words, became extremely unpleasant to him.'' [67: 608] Though the language has a religious and romantic character, Beveridge's account portrays the coexistence of distinctly disciplinary process by which music acts as a moral agency on both a physical and cognitive level. In referencing Beveridge's moral embodiment through his appreciation of the organ, and the 'calming' effect of choral exercises at a school in Boston, Wines advocates the value of music as disciplinary, rather than representational mechanism in the production, in Foucault's terms [9], of 'docile bodies'.
Music's role as a key to the manipulation of the soul is still present in the disciplinary frame, it is only that the place of the soul was shifted to the entire body and its configuration of gestures. The capacity for music to make the body knowable was still present at the end of the nineteenth-century, it functioned as a way of opening up the individual for study, judgement, adaptation, and integration within a larger social organism. This process show's how music's place within the carceral institution must be understood as a double articulation of both mechanical and discursive power over the subject. Though the language and metaphysics of punishment was shifting, we may perceive music's role throughout the prison and in the expanding apparatus of social control in the nineteenth-century as, to some extent, part of a continuation of ideas which are still present today. The romantic view of music as wedded to the soul of the subject, is still a vital part of the popular, and commercial discourse around music. Though the relationship between music and the prison begun to take on a decidedly disciplinary character throughout this era, the powerful discourse of the soul was a script which has yet to leave our cultural vocabulary. 'Darker than the Dungeon': Music, Ambivalence, and the… 295

Conclusion
The paper has sought to provide an account of music's largely unexplored institutional history within the carceral expansion of the nineteenth century and this concluding passage will summarise some of the key points for further consideration. Rather than providing an exhaustive history of this topic, the article has sought to explore the features of music which have made it a persistent and important feature of carceral space today.
Foucault's account of the prison in Discipline and Punish has such an enduring legacy for researchers across a wide variety of academic disciplines because it is able to demonstrate how the carceral techniques described in the reformatory in Mettray [9], for instance, were so vividly perceptible across the institutional framework emerging throughout Europe and America at the time. Many institutions still function, to a large extent, in the way outlined by Foucault and rely on particular ways of thinking about and evaluating the subject.
The article has sought to outline a way of thinking about music as part of the emergence of these 'carceral technologies' in order to extend the current understanding of music within the prison towards a more equivocal notion of political agency. I have argued that music's role as a technology of domination must be seen in relation to its role as a technology of the self and as a form of 'acoustical agency'. Music's presence within the prison is often subject to forms of institution bounding and contestation, and we must therefore situate it's emancipatory potential as part of a wider context of carceral power.
Considering the wider implications of 'the carceral' I wish to briefly consider DeNora's [7] conception of music as a technology of the self alongside Foucault's more circumspect configuration [10]. While both are premised on a non-essential and aestheticized concept of the self, Foucault's suggestions that technologies of self and power tend to be related, and that each form of technology constitutes a form of domination are interesting to consider in relation to the carceral history of music. I have suggested here how music's relationship to the self constituted a 'technology of power' as an important means of 'objectifying' carceral subjects, by creating a space of enunciation whereby claims about the moral and behavioural constitution of the subject are made. In the final section, the reformatory approaches outlined by Hullah and Maconochie illustrate this relationship between technology of self and domination. Here, music became a strategy of imparting forms of selfgovernance on carceral subjects within the prison and across the wider carceral state. Perhaps by tendering our understanding of music as a 'technology of the self' with a greater sensitivity to the way these practices might participate in forms of exclusion and coercion we may be better placed to apprehend 'constrained agency' [19] through the situated study of music.
As outlined in the introduction, the role of music in prison today is determined as much as it was in the nineteenth century by the carceral institution. Though as Rice and Hemsworth suggest it remains a space open to forms of contestation and negotiation for prisoners, the musical language of reform and the soul has given way to a new institutional constitution within the discourses of coercion (incentivisation), well-being, and rehabilitation. Considering music as politically ambivalent may assist as a means of critically interrogating these discursive forms within contemporary carceral space and lead us to reflect more fully on music's enabling applications alongside its restrictive and regulatory frames.
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