The following is an excerpt from the Introduction to the
author’s Just Vibrations: The Purpose of
Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016, foreword by Susan
McClary), available both in
print and Open
Access. The goal
of OA has been to democratize the
book’s accessibility, regardless of readers’ income, class, employment,
institutional resources, or professional status. Reprinted with
permission from the University of Michigan Press.
Leading up to the 2009 conference for Feminist Theory and
Music, Lydia
Hamessley shared this memory:
The genesis of the first FTM can be traced to the American Musicological Society annual meeting in Baltimore, MD in 1988. At that conference, there was an unprecedented critical mass of panels and papers that focused on “women in music.” . . . At a Committee on the Status of Women meeting, Rosemary Killam rose in anger when a male audience member (I absolutely cannot remember who it was) suggested that it wasn’t his problem if his female students couldn’t work late in the library because they feared walking across campus late at night. “Oh yes, it is, sir; yes, it is!” she shouted.
What institutional and intellectual alibis could lead a
scholar (or any person) to voice a disregard for students’ safety? We can try
to guess where this male audience member believed his priorities lay: in
musicology, in the study of music—its beauty, import, intricacies. Music served
as an out, enabling him to run from extracurricular care.
Maybe this man didn’t mean what he said. No doubt, we all
say bad things and lamentably sound off from time to time. Maybe he regretted
his words and quickly reformed his views. Most of us would agree, after all,
that a professor does bear responsibilities for students’ well-being. It’s
common sense and basic decency, an implicit clause in the job contract. Actually,
it’s more than just a clause: arguably, it’s the moral bottom line. Students,
not least women walking alone at night, have legitimate reasons to be on guard
against incident of rape and violence. In September 2015, the Association of
American Universities published results of a massive survey on sexual assault.
Across twenty-seven
universities, “the incidence of sexual assault and sexual misconduct due
to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation among female
undergraduate student respondents was 23.1 percent, including 10.8 percent who
experienced penetration.” Although some writers have since criticized this
survey for its methodologies and possible inaccuracies, the disseminated
results have helped boost awareness and action across campuses. Skeptics are
entitled to continue quibbling about the infamous one-in-five or one-in-four
statistic (the percentage of female college students who allegedly experience
sexual assault), but at a certain point, the hairsplitting starts to sound
apologist. Numerically, any study contains margins of error. The point is that
ethically—when it comes to our collective obligations to address these
injuries—the margin of error should be zero.
Let’s pose the question of scholarly priorities in a more
challenging way. Is musicology about
the safety of a female music student? No, it isn’t, if we define musicology
starkly as the study of music. But yes,
it is, if we envision musicology as all the activities, care, and
caregiving of people who identify as members of the musicology community. In a
post-Obama yes-we-can era, Killam’s yes, it is! can serve anew as a
disciplinary rallying cry. Beyond overtly activist work, what if we regularly
upheld care not just as a bonus activity or a by-product of scholarship? In a
world where injuries run rampant, what if care is the point?
Riffing on Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol, Phil
Ford has characterized the discipline of musicology as “anything
you can get away with.” By this, he means that rather than categorically
insisting on what topics do or do not fall under musicology, let’s conceive of
musicology as whatever self-identified musicologists choose to do. Disciplinary
boundaries incessantly shift and shimmer anyway—so why not justify their
flexibility via people’s diverse, quirky interests? “The primary pleasure that
scholarship offers is the chance to encounter other minds and thereby expand
one’s own,” Ford muses. “The full range of other minds constitutes the true
horizon that bounds the humanist; nothing human should be alien to us.” But if
musicology is anything we can get away with,
a caveat is that the discipline must simultaneously encompass everything we
cannot afford to run away from—care,
compassion, and interpersonal concerns that don’t always sound scholarly as
such. In other words, the purpose of disciplinary belonging isn’t to get away
with your choice of labor, so as merely to survive. The purpose is to thrive
and to enable others to do so in turn. For scholars fortunate enough to land on
tenure tracks or obtain positions of influence, doesn’t the task of caring
become even more pressing? Cynthia
Wu declares that we shouldn’t “forget about the original
purpose of tenure—to protect academic freedom.” Yet Wu also implores us not to
forget the duties of academic
freedom—namely, to advocate for people who do not possess such freedom and its
privileges. Tenure, Jennifer
Ruth believes, “enable[s] you to endure unpopularity for something
bigger than yourself.” Academic freedom, then, isn’t a license to be carefree.
It’s an opportunity to care widely,
assertively, and generously.
Ford points to Susan McClary as an example of a scholar who
endured unpopularity for her trailblazing overtures in feminist musicology.
McClary’s initial adversity can remind us to “appreciate the license her work
gave to all of us coming up behind her. She took a lot of crap—the critical
response to Feminine Endings was perhaps
the most epic bout of mansplaining in the history of musicology—but
she . . . did it with style, and
she got away with it.” The flair of McClary’s prose, Ford emphasizes, went
a long way in boosting the influence and controversies of Feminine Endings. As academics know, writing and speaking
proficiently can carry enormous cachet. Sounding good grabs attention. It gets
people to care.
With this in mind, Just
Vibrations asks a small question with big answers: what is the purpose of
sounding good? Rhetorically, sounding good entails writing and speaking in a
seemingly intelligent manner, which can impress people, win arguments, and
elevate one’s status. Paranoid criticism, as described by Sedgwick, exemplifies
some of these dazzling tactics. An ability to reason artfully and communicate
efficiently reaps rewards. Even in our most banal exchanges, we’re constantly navigating tricky tides of
verbal and sonic propriety. Recognizing the importance of language to our
self-presentation, we choose words and sounds that minimize our risks of being
shamed or shot down. Fear of sounding bad, sounding off, or sounding wrong can
deter expression altogether. If you write eloquently enough, will your paper
get accepted by a top-ranked journal? If you speak normatively enough during a
phone interview, can you pass as straight, able-bodied, white, and American,
potentially improving your chances? If you sing melodiously enough, will your
amateur YouTube recordings go viral? History has shown how mighty pens and
silver tongues—just ink on a page, just vibrations in the air—can move mountains
and make leaders. In this regard, sounding good is a means of doing well in
society, if by well we mean claiming
positions of power.
My proposal, simply put, is this: what if the primary
purpose of sounding good isn’t to do well, but to do good? In competitive
economies, doing well tends to mean pulling ahead of others. Doing good would
involve reaching out and reaching back, lending help to those in need, and
seeking opportunities for care and repair. Repair is a crucial word here. Its
many significations include physical reassembly, bodily rehabilitation,
restorative justice, monetary reparation, and disaster relief. But repair also
attaches to crass synonyms of fix and
cure, notions easily co-opted by a
capitalist ethos of purportedly healthy competition and its reinvestments in
inequality, resilience, and normativity. In Just
Vibrations, I’m interested in the ethical tensions within repair’s
connotations, and specifically in reparative horizons where speech acts and
other sonic matter converge. Literate societies put huge stock in rhetorical
ability—yet for reasons of alterity, disability, or disenfranchisement, some
people do not speak well (by societal conventions), some are admonished for
speaking too much (oversharing and making noise), some do not speak frequently
(due to, say, shyness), some speak unusually (slowly, or with a stutter, or via
conspicuous technological assistance), some do not speak at all (from injury or
trauma), and some speak but nevertheless go unheard. By the same token, some
people hear (neuro)typically, whereas others hear less (by normative
standards), hear differently (Deaf Gain), or hear too much (sensory overload,
hyperacusis). None of these conditions should be grounds for depriving
individuals of compassion and connection. Try to recall a time in your life
when you found yourself speechless or supernoisy, whether from joyous news or
devastating injuries, from a gorgeous sight or a terrible deed. Amid crushing
silence or the din of shouts—at the apex of emotion—you felt, as the saying
goes, beside yourself. As such,
sounding good likely also felt beside the
point, as you stayed mute or snorted or sobbed or hollered. Yet these are
often the precise moments when we most desire companionship, consolation, and
leeway. Beyond questions of words and feelings, Just Vibrations reimagines the viability of solidarity and optimism
through our pressures to sound good and hear good in daily life, where sounding and hearing signify more capaciously than as the literal faculties of able
minds and bodies.
As a musicologist, I’ve sometimes heard colleagues from
other disciplines tell me how lucky I am to spend my days (they assume)
listening to and thinking about music. Studying music, these envious comments
imply, must be a labor of love. I’ve been led to wonder, therefore, whether
musical skills ever enable or prime us to listen better to people and to take up love’s labors more broadly. Do musicians and
musicologists—having undergone so much ear-training—possess any specialized
aural capabilities or inclinations when it comes not just to music, but also to
human interlocutors (how they sound, what they say, and unvoiced concerns)?
People and musical pieces are obviously different entities, yet people
routinely identify with music and identify
as musical, sounding out
subjectivities through melodies, lyrics, and bodies. Without painting an
exceptionalist portrait of musicianship, is it possible that people who work
with music for a living can lead by example in agendas of interpersonal care
and communication? Could we go beyond modest understandings of empathy as a
complement to musicality, and venture empathy as a resonant form of musicality?
If part of musicianship can involve listening for better worlds, then
musicology has the potential to initiate various progressive currents in ethics
and critical thinking. To be clear, this isn’t saying that music makes us good
people. It’s saying that certain aural positions may hold profound uses outside
the music classroom, and that as much as anyone else, musicians and music
scholars already recognize the immense challenges and rewards of listening
creatively and caringly.
As evidenced by Musicology
Now and many other websites (see here,
here,
here),
questions of care and outreach have lately assembled under the umbrella
initiatives of accessible musicology and public musicology, both of which push
scholars to teach and learn from people outside the academy. Public
musicology’s label is recent, but the practice is not. Agendas of justice,
social change, and environmentalism have radiated through many of musicology’s
siblings and study groups, from music education and music therapy to
ecomusicology and applied ethnomusicology. By all appearances, public
musicology has been happening for a while. And how could it not, given this
wired era of social media and rapid informational exchange? Borrowing from Nicholas
Cook: we are all public musicologists now. The only question is
what kinds of scholars we choose to be and how to lead by example.
William Cheng (@willxcheng) teaches at Dartmouth College. His most recent book, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), calls for an ethics of care, compassion, and outreach in music and musicology. Website here.
William Cheng (@willxcheng) teaches at Dartmouth College. His most recent book, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), calls for an ethics of care, compassion, and outreach in music and musicology. Website here.
Musicology and Aesthetic Discernment
ReplyDeleteDear Professor Cheng,
I have met a few people who believe that only musicologists, theorists and other academics truly understand music at the deepest level. But this makes no sense to me.
Based on knowledge and experience, the experience or understanding we individually get from music simply differs.... A musicologist can understand a lot about a work's structure and history but can at the same time be an emotional invalid.
Right?
And isn't the emotional experience also a part of listening to music?
I think you have your answer, Amanda. Sorry that it's not what you were looking for.
ReplyDeleteHi Amanda,
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this will help answer your question or not (Also, I am no Mr. Cheng), but I believe that these few people you refer to are most likely looking at aesthetics (and more specifically, musical aesthetics) under the belief that an artwork (or any object) can only be interpreted within an historical context. The biggest voice of this idea is perhaps Gadamer(1900-2002), though E.D. Hirsch also puts forward something similar. The argument is over whether the artwork can be appreciated through an ahistoric lense, that is in the sense of Kantian "pure beauty," or whether the signifiers of the work will carry a different meaning to different generations, and therefore require a significant historical knowledge to appreciate. While Gadamer argues that there is no 'true' interpretation of a work, he suggests that the quality of an interpretation is heavily influenced by the listener's historical self-awareness.
I personally think it is impossible to have an emotionally invalid understanding, but I do agree, and I think many other will as well, that the historical knowledge does not wholly dictate the quality of an interpretation. E.D. Hirsch, however, defines the 'true' interpretation as the understanding of the artist's(composer's) intent. Through this lens, musicologists are perhaps best equipped to understand a piece of Music.
warm regards,
Paul