This chapter explores the notion of attunement in correlation with Stimmung, mood, and atmosphere through the understanding of phenomenology. It starts with Edmund Husserl’s lectures on inner time consciousness through music and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of Stimmung and its early reception in the field of music. Philosopher Joseph Kockelmans, musicologist Karol Berger, and English philosopher Andrew Bowie understood the concept of Stimmung, also comprehended as mood, within the field of music. Thus, researchers used a whole series of concepts closely related to the idea of attunement in the analysis of contemporary culture and art. The chapter then notes the emergence of atmosphere, referencing how new phenomenology and its associated aesthetics comprehended that emotions are atmospheres poured out spatially.

Despite the attention that the affective sphere has reached in the last decades, affectivity has generally been supposed to be a consequence of historical processes, not changing their direction. This article argues instead that affectivity can be a driving force in historical change, and it establishes the concept of ‘patheme’ in relation to Michel Foucault’s ‘episteme’, Martin Heidegger’s ‘history of being’ and the notion of regime in William Reddy, Jacques Rancière and Peter de Bolla. What is described as a pathemic change took place in the thoroughgoing affective transformation of European culture during the 18th century, a cultural change that in Sweden was condensed into much more compressed shifts during the Gustav III’s reign (1772–92). This latter period is bestowed an investigation grounded in an understanding of historical processes that considers the interplay between layers such as power relations, social conditions and modes of scientific thought along with affectivity. The interplay is described in terms of polyphony.

The reign of the Swedish king Gustav III (1771–92) was a productive period musically. It has become one of the main fields of research within Swedish musicology: more than 40 scholarly articles have been published and ten book-length studies have been printed since 1920. In the article, these texts are read from a critical perspective in order to scrutinize the foundation of the research and to analyse its conditions, but also to see if a transgression is possible.

If the ethos of Swedish musicology, with its empirical attitude concerning the survey of sources, can be confirmed in many cases, some examples show that there have been important alternatives: the intention of writing the cultural history of the period (especially Walin and Hedwall), the interest in rhetoric during the 1990s, and investigations of nationalism. The shift from a German to an Anglo-American influence can be discerned during the 1950s, and this change can be the reason why a wider cultural approach became obsolete.

Yet, responding to the earlier initiatives, it is suggested finally that musicology can and should turn back to the Gustavian era again after a caesura of fifteen years. Recent work within fields such as affectivity, phenomenology and cultural transfer call upon a re-reading of the manifold sources that have been found during a century of research.