Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights [2 ed.] 1138222135, 9781138222137

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Theory for Ethnomusicology

Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights, Second Edition, is a foundational work for courses in ethnomusicological theory. This book examines key intellectual movements and topic areas in social and cultural theory, and explores the way they have been taken up in ­ethnomusicological research. New co-editor Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone investigate the discipline’s past, present, and future, reflecting on contemporary concerns while cataloging significant developments since the publication of the first edition in 2008. A dozen contributors approach a broad range of theoretical topics alive in ethnomusicology. Each chapter examines ethnographic and historical works from within ethnomusicology, ­showcasing the unique contributions scholars in the field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs, while illuminating the field’s relevance and pointing the way toward new horizons of research. New to This Edition: • • •

Every chapter in the book is completely new, with richer and more comprehensive discussions. New chapters have been added on gender and sexuality, sound and voice studies, performance and critical improvisation studies, and theories of participation. New text boxes and notes make connections among the chapters, emphasizing points of contact and conflict among intellectual movements.

Contributors: Jayson Beaster-Jones Harris M. Berger Esther Clinton J. Martin Daughtry Maureen Mahon Peter Manuel Katherine Meizel Matthew Rahaim Ruth M. Stone Jane C. Sugarman Jeremy Wallach Ellen Waterman Harris M. Berger is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, Director of the R ­ esearch Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place, and Professor of Music and Folklore at ­Memorial University of Newfoundland. Ruth M. Stone is the Laura Boulton Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology in the ­Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University.

Theory for Ethnomusicology Histories, Conversations, Insights

Edited by Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

Second Edition

Second edition published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Pearson Education, Inc. 2008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-22213-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-22214-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-40858-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

List of Text Boxes and Tables Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

vii viii xii 1

H arris M . B erg er and Ruth M . S t o ne

1 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches to Ethnomusicology: From Abstract Structure to Situated Practice

26

J ays o n B easter- J o nes

2 Marxist Approaches to Music, Political Economy, and the Culture Industries: Ethnomusicological Perspectives

51

P eter M anuel

3 Theories of Gender and Sexuality: From the Village to the Anthropocene

71

J ane C . S u g arman

4 Constructing Race and Engaging Power through Music: Ethnomusicology and Critical Approaches to Race

99

M aureen M ah o n

5 Theories of the Post-colonial and Globalization: Ethnomusicologists Grapple with Power, History, Media, and Mobility

114

J eremy Wallach and E sther C lint o n

6 Performance Studies and Critical Improvisation Studies in Ethnomusicology: Understanding Music and Culture through Situated Practice

141

E llen Waterman

7 Decentering Music: Sound Studies and Voice Studies in Ethnomusicology K atherine M ei z el and J . M artin Dau g htry

176

vi Contents 8 Phenomenology and Phenomenological Ethnomusicology: Approaches to the Lived Experience of Music

204

H arris M . B erg er

9 Theories of Participation

219

M atthew R ahaim

Notes on Contributors Index

233 237

Text Boxes and Tables

Text Boxes 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 6.1

Embodiment and Practice across the Disciplines 30 Linguistics and Semiotics in the Context of Analytic Philosophy 32 Practice Theory 54 Relationships among Differing Traditions of Critical Research 62 Performance Studies in Folklore 146

Tables 1.1 Jakobson’s Model of Language Functions 31 1.2 Peirce’s Three Main Sign Types 34

Preface

Writing with what was likely a mix of sincere wonder and dry irony, Gertrude Stein famously stated, “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences” ([1935] 2004: 124). The same can be said of social and cultural theory. Readers come to a work of ethnomusicology for a range of reasons—to learn more about a music they love, to discover a new social world, to satisfy the demands of a manuscript reviewer, or to earn a grade in a class. But among the items on that list, the search for broadly applicable insights into social and cultural phenomena must surely be ranked high. That quest can be a powerful thing. Seductive and alluring, works of theory can help us to understand the complexities of social life and inspire profound commitments and actions. We love social and cultural theory, and we evoke Stein’s mix of wonder and irony at the outset of this book because we are aware that not all readers come to this topic with keen anticipation and unbridled delight. Many are drawn to our field because of a fascination with particular musical and social phenomena. They want to learn more about the stirring melodies of Umm Kulthūm or Billie Holiday, the powerful textures of the gamelan in Java or California, the social relationships that emerge in the hollow square of a Sacred Harp singing event or the mosh pit of a heavy metal show, or the flow of beats around the world in electronic dance music or jazz. For a person whose primary goal is to know this music or these people, social and cultural theory can sometimes feel like an obstacle that stands between oneself and the musical and social experiences one cares about. At their worst, discussions of theory—in a book or article, the question-and-answer portion of a conference panel, or a conversation in a seminar or coffee shop—can devolve into exercises in empty erudition and self-aggrandizement. But it is rarely wise to treat worst case scenarios as exemplars. As one facet of research in the humanities and social sciences, theory offers a powerful gift—the capacity to understand our fieldsites more deeply, to gain broad insights into social life, and to see and act in the world in new ways. Before the development of the social sciences in the Western academy, what today is called “theory” was simply referred to as social philosophy, political philosophy, or aesthetics. With the birth of sociology and anthropology as academic disciplines in the nineteenth century, a range of thinkers began to lay down what were understood as the theoretical foundations upon which empirical social research was to be based. Today, sociology has a sub-field that is known simply as “social theory,” anthropology has long-standing theoretical traditions, and works of social and cultural theory in many disciplines are clearly rooted in philosophy and the first social sciences. While these fields have retained their relevance in contemporary intellectual life, the scope of theory today is far broader than this. The twentieth century saw the emergence of a wide range of new academic disciplines—ethnomusicology among them—that drew on or critiqued older theoretical traditions and developed new insights of their own. And the academy is not the only source of theory. Activists, revolutionaries,

Preface  ix

artists, journalists, culture brokers, lawyers, and public intellectuals both within and beyond the academy have developed key theoretical insights. It is this topic—beguiling and complex, difficult but endlessly rewarding—that we explore in these pages.

How to Use This Book In many ways, this is exactly the book that we wished we had as graduate students. For both beginning and advanced students, theory is a topic that can produce great amounts of anxiety. The sheer number of writings in contemporary social thought can be overwhelming, and the twisted, intersecting paths of intellectual history can be bewildering. In language that is as accessible as it is sophisticated, the contributors to this book discuss a broad range of the theoretical work alive in contemporary ethnomusicology and provide the reader with an overview of key segments of today’s discipline. Each chapter identifies an important theoretical movement (e.g. Marxism or phenomenology) or a topic area that has developed its own body of theory (e.g. gender and sexuality), tells the story of its intellectual and social history, synthesizes its key insights, and shows how ideas from that literature have been used in ethnomusicology. Many chapters provide extended examples from the author’s own research. Working their way through a given chapter, students will be able to move from the shifting landscape of theory anxiety to firm ground, confident that they have gotten the lay of the land, know how to approach the literature on this subject, and understand how this body of ideas can be made useful in their research. But this book is not just for students. Each chapter examines theoretical and empirical works from within ethnomusicology and shows the unique contributions that scholars in our field have made to wider, transdisciplinary dialogs. Synthesizing ethnomusicological contributions, the chapters highlight the broad relevance of our field and point the way toward new horizons of research. In so doing, the book will, we hope, be of interest to scholars moving into new research areas and to anyone seeking a synthetic vision of key segments of our discipline and where its conversations are heading. The book is organized as a coherent whole and can be read profitably from cover to cover. In broad strokes, the first chapters cover theoretical orientations with the longest histories, a set of middle chapters are concerned with the scholarship of social critique, and the later chapters focus on intellectual movements that have emerged more recently. However, each chapter can also be treated as a stand-alone essay, and readers may work their way through the book in a nonlinear fashion, using the textboxes and the forward and backward references to follow themes that speak to their interests. Setting the book’s chapters into perspective, the Introduction discusses the nature of social and culture theory, explores the relationship between theoretical work and other kinds of projects that ethnomusicologists pursue, and offers ideas about the most effective ways to approach intellectual history. Whatever order one reads the chapters, the Introduction is the natural starting point. At the outset, we want to make clear what this book does not do. This book’s topic is a portion of the traditions of social and cultural theory that are important to the discipline of ethnomusicology in English-speaking North America today. Given the interdisciplinary nature of our field and the transdisciplinary nature of theory, we have had to be selective in choosing our subjects, and we make no claim that this book presents a comprehensive discussion of contemporary theory or a complete review of theory within ethnomusicology itself. Balancing depth and breadth always involves judgment calls, and we have chosen to explore works and ideas that resonate most strongly across the chapters and across our discipline. Further, we would emphasize that the subject of research methods is not a focus of this book. While theory and method are closely related, methodology is a large and complex topic in its own right. Discussing both in a single volume, we felt, would have made this book unwieldy. In the Introduction, we examine the relationship between theory and

x Preface

method, and brief discussions of the implications of theory for methodological issues appear in some chapters. However, the book does not pretend to offer a comprehensive discussion of this subject. Likewise, while a good part of the book concerns itself with the intellectual history of particular bodies of theory or topic areas, it does not pretend to be a history of the discipline of ethnomusicology.

New to This Edition While this book examines many of the subjects discussed in the first edition, it is an entirely new work. Where the first edition was a single-authored monograph, this second edition contains chapters by twelve scholars, each a specialist with a deep knowledge in their area. Further, the book has been reorganized to better reflect the concerns of the contemporary discipline. We have deleted chapters on subjects that were only of historical interest or could not be covered adequately in the space allotted, created new chapters on subjects that were not discussed in the first edition, and devoted full chapters to subjects that were treated only with a section or subsection of the original edition. •

• •

•

•

Every chapter in the book has been greatly expanded, providing richer and more comprehensive discussions. All of the contributors have worked to ensure that the chapters place their subjects in wider social and political contexts, emphasize the role that ethnomusicologists have played in interdisciplinary conversations, and highlight emerging questions and concerns. New to this edition are full chapters on gender and sexuality, sound studies and voice studies, performance studies and critical improvisation studies, and theories of participation. Structuralism, which was given an entire chapter in the first edition, is now discussed in a section of the chapter on linguistic and semiotic approaches. This allows readers to more effectively place this subject in its intellectual context. The chapters on cultural evolutionism in comparative musicology and structural-functionalism in anthropology have been eliminated, as these are only of historical interest and neither is tenable in the contemporary discipline. In their stead, discussions of ethnomusicology’s colonial legacy—and the project of decolonizing the discipline—are threaded throughout the book. The book’s first edition had a short chapter on historical approaches and treated this subject as a specialized topic. Since the first edition was published, historical work has become common in every part of our discipline. Rather than devote a single chapter to this topic, the theme of history and references to works of historical ethnomusicology are woven throughout the entire book. New text boxes and endnotes make connections between the chapters, emphasizing wider intellectual trends, as well as points of contact and conflict among theoretical movements. New backward and forward references likewise draw attention to interdisciplinary dialog and debate. ***

Looking back across the development of this project, we have come to believe that the most provocative theoretical perspectives emerge in the conversations that occur at ­meeting places: between ethnomusicologists and their research participants, between our ­preconceived ­notions and the phenomena we uncover in the field or archive, between our research and our everyday lives, between our research and our teaching, and between our research and our public

Preface  xi

programs, our activism, and other forms of participation in the ­public sphere. Our project in this book has been to try to keep all of this in view. ­Interpreting Charles Seeger’s ideas about musicology and music research ([1970] 1977), Anthony Seeger described ethnomusicology as a kind of meeting place, with paths to new research and new insights radiating in and out in every direction (1987: 493–494). This book seeks to map these paths and suggest, at least in part, where they might be leading. Harris M. Berger St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada Ruth M. Stone Bloomington, Indiana, USA August 2018

Works Cited Seeger, Anthony. 1987. “Do We Need to Remodel Ethnomusicology?” Ethnomusicology 31 (3): 491–495. Seeger, Charles. (1970) 1977. “Toward a Unitary Field Theory for Musicology.” In Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975, 102–138. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stein, Gertrude. (1935) 2004. “Poetry and Grammar.” In Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1911–1945, edited by Patricia Meyerowitz. London: Peter Owen.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the contributors to this book, who convened in the ­summer of 2017 at the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place (MMaP) at Memorial University of Newfoundland for a meeting that substantially enhanced the depth and coherence of the project. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada ­Research Chairs Program, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Memorial’s School of Music for their support of that meeting. Special thanks go to Dr. Meghan Forsyth, project coordinator and researcher at MMaP, and Spencer Crewe, MMaP’s digital audio studio coordinator, for their work on the meeting. We would like to express our appreciation to Lynne Stillings for her recommendations for references to the literature on the ethnomusicology of childhood. Thanks also go to Jane C. Sugarman for introducing us to Stillings and for suggesting the felicitous phrase “Looking Ahead,” which was adopted by several contributors as the title for the concluding section of their chapters. We also acknowledge the assistance of Alison Martin of Indiana University and Monique McGrath of Memorial University of Newfoundland, who aided us in our work. I (Berger) would like to thank Beverley Diamond, Meghan Forsyth, Giovanna P. Del Negro, Judith Hamera, and Kati Szego for their insights into social and cultural theory, and their generous conversations about this project throughout its development. I also express my appreciation to Robert Carley for suggesting sources and offering insights on the ­relationship between Marxism other traditions of critical research, and to Christopher Menzel for sharing perspectives and sources in analytic philosophy. Most of all, I would like to thank Ruth Stone, who initiated this project, for her wisdom and kindness, both in the time that we developed this book and in our many years of working together. I (Stone) would like to thank all of my students and colleagues over the years, who have stimulated conversations about theory and its importance to the field of ethnomusicology. I am particularly indebted to Harris M. Berger for his willingness to host the meeting for contributors to this volume and for his deep and sustained dedication to the project.

Introduction Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

The Work of Theory The earliest roots of ethnomusicology can be found in the late nineteenth century, when a group of scholars in Germany from a range of disciplines and known as the Berlin School collaborated to study the music of the world. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, an increasing number of anthropologists and musicologists in Europe and North American brought the methodologies of their discipline to bear on this topic. In 1955, their diverse efforts coalesced into the contemporary field of ethnomusicology with the establishment of the Society for Ethnomusicology. At that time, the division between musicologists, who sought to understand the music structures that they found in non-Western cultures, and anthropologists, who wanted to understand the place of music in the social life of their fieldsites, formed the central dynamic of the field. While a minority of scholars in today’s discipline may still feel uncomfortable with ethnomusicological studies that do not present musical transcriptions or engage in traditional music analysis, the division between musicological and anthropological ethnomusicology has receded from prominence in our field. In its place is a rich and varied intellectual landscape where scholars pursue an enormously wide range of projects, and it is this diversity that makes the role of theory in contemporary ethnomusicology both so difficult and so tantalizing. No single organizing scheme seems perfect in making sense of the work done in ethnomusicology in English-speaking North America today. For example, one way of coming to grips with the research done in the field would be through the familiar rubric of text and context. Thinking in this way, one might imagine a spectrum that ranges from work on ­music sound in auditory cognition (e.g. Fales 2002) and contemporary studies of music analysis in an ethnomusicological context (Tenzer and Roeder 2011), through studies of face-to-face interaction in the performance event that explore phenomena like music and gesture (Rahaim 2012) or music and trance (Friedson 2009), to research that explores macrosocial phenomena like the music industries (Beaster-Jones 2016) or other institutional contexts for music making (Wade 2014). Alternatively, one might organize the field by ­contrasting ethnographic studies of particular locales in the present with, on the one hand, multi-sited ethnographies (Rapport 2014) and, on the other, works of historical ethnomusicology that explore the ways music and culture change over time (Carr 2014). Activist scholars may contrast work that doesn’t explicitly address politics with critical studies of race/ethnicity (e.g. Mahon 2004), gender and sexuality (Spiller 2010), class (Berger 1999; Murphy 2014), the predicaments of the colonial or post-colonial world (Ochoa Gautier 2014), or any of their complex intersections. Or one may contrast the ethnomusicology of music and culture with that work that seeks to move beyond the notion of music altogether and take as its object of study a more encompassing topic, such as sound (Wong 2004; Daughtry 2015; see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume).

2  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

While there can be no single rubric for definitively organizing the research in ethnomusicology, one feature common to every study is a theoretical orientation—a set of fundamental ideas about the phenomena that one finds in the world, the questions one should be asking about them, and the means and ends of that inquiry. Although some ethnomusicologists may not emphasize the theoretical foundations of their research or frame their contributions in explicitly theoretical terms, all work in the ethnomusicology (or any of the social sciences and humanities) rely on theory. All writing and research in ethnomusicology entail assumptions about the nature of music and social life. Poorly grounded research fails to examine those assumptions, and in taking those assumptions for granted confuses the researcher’s personal experience with universal truth. Well-grounded research rests on assumptions as well, but the researcher examines her assumptions richly, seeking to transform them from an incoherent and idiosyncratic mass of contradictions and truisms into a relatively coherent whole that is open to revision by new information and can lead to new insights and new topics for inquiry. The work of theory is not isolated and personal contemplation, though it certainly involves careful thinking and even the stray long, dark night of the soul. Rather, theoretical work is a fundamentally social endeavor. In it, we bring our life experiences into conversation with the ideas from theoretical and empirical literatures, academic colleagues, research participants, and others to contribute to all manner of social projects. Those ­conversations—their ideas and insights, their pitfalls and opportunities, their arguments and evidence—are the subject of this book. Each chapter presents an overview of a theoretical tradition or topic area that is important for contemporary ethnomusicology. While the linkages among these various traditions and topic areas are many, we could no more offer a single narrative of the history of social and cultural theory in ethnomusicology than we could present a master ­organizing scheme for the kinds of work that go on in the field today. Our starting place must therefore be this common ground, the work of theory itself, in ethnomusicology today.

Description, Interpretation and Analysis, and Theory To get a clearer sense of what theory is, we need to put it into the context of other types of work that ethnomusicologists do. Broadly speaking, three kinds of activities go on in ethnomusicological studies—description, interpretation and analysis, and theory. Description provides an account of particular states of affairs. Interpretive and analytic work takes those descriptions and tries to make sense of the social worlds from which they come. Theory seeks broadly applicable insights into social phenomena. Understanding the interplay between these kinds of work is the first step toward putting theory into perspective. In any given book or article, a scholar may move back and forth among these three levels. For example, several chapters of my (Berger’s) first book discuss music making in the heavy metal, jazz, and commercial hard rock scenes of Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. In those chapters, I present descriptions of the clothing people wore on particular nights, the layout and design of the venues, and the conduct of the audience and performers. Interspersed with these descriptions are interpretations of meaning. At heavy metal shows, for example, audience members in the mosh pit (an informally demarcated area in front of the stage) would alternate between bumping into each while grinning sheepishly and aggressively body-checking each other without actually trying to cause serious physical harm. While the previous sentence is primarily descriptive—providing an account of the practices that occurred in the mosh pit—it has interpretive overtones: saying that their grins were sheepish implies something about the meaning of their facial expression, and saying that the people in the pit weren’t trying to cause serious physical harm offers an interpretation

Introduction  3

of the participant’s intent. Moving from description with interpretive overtones to more explicitly interpretive passages, I wrote about the significance that stylized performances of aggression have in the world of metal and why metalheads would want to participate in performances that take rage and aggression as their theme. Contemporary ethnomusicologists engage a wide variety of scholarly tasks, but the interpretation of music and cultures is the most common kind of work that scholars in our field today pursue. This kind of work has a long history in both ethnomusicology and anthropology, but one of its most sophisticated advocates was the anthropologist Clifford Geertz.1 Geertz famously described the work of ethnography as “thick description” (1973)—the interpretation of the dense, multi-layered, culturally specific meanings that play out in both everyday life and in heightened spheres performance, like ritual or festival.2 Pursuing interpretive work, the ethnomusicologist places musical practices and musical works in larger cultural contexts, “reads” the meaning of those practices, and seeks to understand local experiences of music. It is important to emphasize that not all of the scholarship that focuses on particular social groups or situations seeks to interpret local perspectives. Rather, studies of specific social situations or groups may analyze musical forms, cultural dynamics, patterns of practice, discursive tropes, or other social phenomena with little or no reference to the viewpoint of the people who participate in them. And, of course, these two approaches to specific social situations (the interpretive and the analytic) may be married together in a wide variety of ways. Descriptive work was most common in ethnomusicology’s pre-history and early years. At that time, many scholars published compendia of songs or wrote ethnographies that did little more than describe the practices of particular rituals or performances. Work that is largely descriptive can be valuable in certain contexts, for example, in documenting or drawing wider cultural attention to a tradition that had previously been ignored, and interpretive work usual entails a descriptive component. Most contemporary ethnomusicologists, however, consider purely descriptive work to be of limited use—a legacy of a time when social scientists took an impoverished vision of the natural sciences as their model, saw musical works or songtexts as isolable units of analysis, and published them with the hope that a theorist would come along later and deduce theories from these data. A majority of books and articles in contemporary ethnomusicology have at least some interpretive or analytic components, and most studies make interpretive or analytic work their focal point, seeking evocative and even novelistic accounts of music and culture that capture the texture of social life in a community or analyzing the forms of cultural and musical phenomena that take place in a particular social world. So far, we have discussed scholarly work that focuses on particular groups or locales, but it is important to see that all research (descriptive, as well as interpretive and analytic) entails theoretical assumptions. On a basic level, the evidentiary foundation of any descriptive claim can always be questioned and the assumptions built into such claims are always open to scrutiny. Consider the seemingly unproblematic descriptive claim that a certain tunebook was initially published in 1975 or that a particular person sang a given song at a specific performance. Regarding the first example, one may discover a copy of a tunebook listing 1972 as the year of publication or learn that a Xeroxed manuscript of the tunes was circulated so widely a few years before that we should question what “publication” means in this community. Considering the second example, some might view the text that the singer voiced as a prayer, which in the culture in question is not considered a kind of music at all and therefore not something that was “sung.” Likewise, all manner of theoretical and cultural perspectives might question the ideas of personhood, agency, and causality implicit in the seemingly simple claim that this singer sang this song. If the song was sung during a play, a recital, or a trance ritual, was it Sarah who sang the song or her character, her stage

4  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

persona, or the spirit who possessed her? Saying that Sarah sang the song implies that she is the cause of it being sounded at this place and time, but was the cause of the performance her personal will, neurochemical processes in her brain, the dictates of tradition, the unfolding of discourse, or the playing out of larger social or political forces? In both purely descriptive works and the descriptive passages of interpretive and analytic ethnographies, the question of significance is always at issue, and this makes a-interpretive or a-theoretical description impossible. The world presents us with an endless array of cultural facts, and the decision to choose to describe this state of affairs rather than some other one, to give more attention to these performers or those, to draw the boundaries of this community here rather than there, to characterize a performance or genre as art or ritual, traditional or innovative (or even as music at all)—to do any of these things entails interpretive, analytic, and ultimately theoretical dimensions. If description is always at least implicitly interpretive, it is equally true that interpretive and analytic work is linked to the project of description, in the sense that, in interpreting or analyzing culture, most ethnomusicologists seek to understand the set of meanings that are alive for their research participants or describe the social phenomena that play out in their world. That this song has a kind of quiet rage (and why these people participate in a practice that prizes that affect), that this genre is a proud badge of our ethnic identity, that these songs give women a new voice in our culture—these are the forms of meaning and significance that interpretive and analytic ethnography most frequently seeks. If even the blandest descriptive statement entails theoretical assumptions, the theoretical implications of interpretation and analytic work are even more significant, and interpretation and analysis can operate at many levels. Scholars may interpret the meaning or significance of a particular musical performance, work, genre, or tradition, and they may explore the meaning that their study object has for a particular person, for a small community, or for differing groups within a larger culture. Because cultural meanings are thick, in Geertz’s sense of the term, the meanings that we find in culture cannot simply be equated with intention. The most important issues in our lives are rarely one-dimensional, and the lives of music makers and music listeners are more often about exploring and discovering the meanings to be found in key musical works and performances, rather than simply bestowing significance upon them.3 An equally broad range of inquiry happens in analytic work. Scholars may analyze the dynamics of face-to-face interaction in a performance event, the patterns of social conduct in a city or region, or the widest currents of globalization or social change on the scale of historical time. With these points, we begin to move toward the domain of theory—the search for broadly applicable insights into social and cultural phenomena. The range of possible topics here is as expansive as social life itself. It includes, for example, both broadly synoptic questions about the nature of music and its role in the social world, as well as sharper questions that include the dynamics of musical meaning making or music perception, the role of music in the construction of racial or gender identities, and the place of music or sound under conditions of colonialism or neo-liberal capitalism. Theoretical writing can be measured, systematic, and intended as a complete and definitive statement, or it can be polemical, provocative, or provisional. What defines it is a search for powerful and broad ranging insights. Above, we argued that all historical or ethnographic case studies are informed by theory. Here, we wish to emphasize that many of the richest case studies use the data from the archive or the field to develop new theoretical understandings. In this context, the description of practices by musicians and listeners provides the raw material for interpretation and analysis, and the interpretations and analyses themselves become the raw material out of which larger theoretical claims are made. Other works present information from two or more social groups and explore their relationships to make theoretical claims. For example,

Introduction  5

one of the main topics of my (Berger’s) first book is the social organization of attention (1999). In that study, I worked with musicians from four different music scenes to understand how each one focused attention on the various elements of their experience (their bodies, music sound, thoughts, and the words or actions of other people). I then compared those readings to show how the musician’s typical practices of organizing attention were unique to each scene and shaped by larger social forces. Of course, not all works in the discipline are case studies. Others, like Alan Merriam’s field defining Anthropology of Music (1964) or classic writings by Charles Seeger (1977), John Blacking (1973), or Bruno Nettl ([1983] 2015), operate mostly in the domain of theory. Such works may draw material from focused case studies, but they spend the bulk of their effort defining concepts, making arguments, identifying social dynamics, and making general claims. To go deeper into the topic of theory, we need to introduce a second set of distinctions that are often drawn in the contemporary academy—theoretical works that stand aloof from social criticism, theoretical works of critique, and theoretical works of activist scholarship, which seek to contribute directly to social change.4 The first kind of theoretical work is descriptive in a relatively straightforward way. Such scholarship seeks generally applicable insights about music and social life. In this sense, theory tries to describe the social world, not its particulars but its patterns, its structures, and its dynamics. Theoretical works of critique also try to describe the dynamics of social life, but they have a second project as well—to identify, highlight, and criticize power relations.5 Such work is not merely descriptive, it’s normative and evaluative. For much of the twentieth century, ethnomusicology was dominated by the first kind of theory; most scholars during this period sought to be objective social scientists or humanists who dispassionately described music and culture, and they shunned politicized work as inherently biased.6 In contrast, a group of ethnomusicologists who came of age in the 1990s were informed by the field of cultural studies and the growing critical tradition in anthropology.7 For these scholars, power is an inescapable feature of social life, and this idea carries with it far ranging significance for ethnomusicological research. On a basic level, holding this view requires scholars to account for the role that hierarchy, domination, and exploitation play in every sphere of experience and area of research. Working out the implications of this idea, critical scholars argue that power relations shape ethnomusicological research itself and that acknowledging this fact allows critical research to offer a more faithful understanding of the social world. In pretending to be aloof from power relations, the older type of theorists blind themselves to their own position in arrays of power relations, critical scholars argue, making apolitical work more, not less, biased. The political situatedness of ethnomusicological inquiry shapes every facet of research, but it is most readily apparent when we consider the goals that scholars have for their projects. For example, structural-functionalism was the dominant theoretical framework in anthropology in the middle of the twentieth century, and it had an important place in ethnomusicology throughout the 1960s. With its interest in identifying the mechanisms that lead to social stability and limit social change, structural-functionalism was deeply implicated in European colonialism, and many anthropologists in this tradition represented their field as a “science of man” that could serve the management of empire. When critical scholars say that all research is political, they do not mean that one should stack the empirical deck, manipulating ethnographic or historical data to serve a pre-existing political agenda. Rather, they mean that scholars must recognize the profound role of power in social life, acknowledge that the act of doing research itself is situated in an existing field of power relations, and be attentive to the political goals implicit in their scholarship. Pushing this last point to what is seen as its logical conclusion, activist scholars do not merely wish to criticize power relations, but rather to do work that will help in remaking them. This view is most famously articulated in the final thesis from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach ([1888] 1969):

6  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Scholars engaged in this kind of project posit theories of social change, develop intellectual or cultural tools for activists, and mobilize their research to try to achieve such ends. Of course, all but the most detached forms of scholarship seek to have a positive impact, if only to encourage critical thinking on a particular topic, provide resources for the teaching of music, inform the public about a culture and its practices, celebrate the musical achievements of a neglected or disparaged group, or foster cross-cultural understanding. Works of activist scholarship seek a more fundamental impact by participating in movements that try to change the very relations of power that organize a society. Such work doesn’t merely critique social relations; it attempts to understand the mechanisms by which they are perpetuated, chart a route to their amelioration, and help steer society in that direction. Perhaps the most pointed statement of such a perspective comes from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright, who has argued that the true test of the validity of a Marxist theory of capitalism lies in its ability to help navigate a path to a post-capitalist social order (Wright and Beggs 2015). Of course, this kind of theory is a complex domain. There can be many strategies of promoting fundamental social change, and social criticism can be understood as one technique for achieving such ends. Set in the broadest context, theoretical works of this kind open out onto other endeavors, including more conventional forms of political activism, performance ethnography, and applied ethnomusicology.8 The projects of interpretive ethnography and analytic work can have critical and activist goals as well, and these kinds of research have their own politics. Many ethnomusicologists see their job as amplifying the voices of marginalized groups within a society, and these scholars are often critical of forms of research that see ethnographic or historical subjects as mere grist for the theorist’s mill. From this perspective, theory is at its worst when a scholar treats her research participants as nothing more than examples of a larger social dynamic. In the 1980s and 1990s, this view was elaborated as part of a sophisticated and highly influential body of writings in cultural anthropology, and scholars refer the problems that this work addressed as the crisis of representation. (See note 1 for a discussion of this topic.) Though some may dismiss any kind of academic theory as irredeemably colonial or merely elitist—the work of a detached and pompous scholar, delivering pronouncements from on high—most in our field embrace theory building as a valid enterprise. One common strategy for addressing these concerns is to place the ideas from social and cultural theorists into conversation with those of one’s research participants. In so doing, such work attends to the politics of ethnographic writing itself.9 In my own work, I (Berger) have argued for a dialectic of critical and relativistic approaches in ethnographic research (1999), and today’s ethnomusicologists approach these issues in a variety of ways. As several chapters in this book make clear, for many bodies of theory, research participants aren’t merely consultants in a project driven by a scholar; rather, they are sophisticated thinkers in their own right, non-academic artists and intellectuals who began developing ideas about music and social life long before they were approached by an ethnomusicologist for an interview and will continue to do so long after the ethnomusicologist’s ethnography is published (see also Shelemay 1998: 2). We will return to this point below when we discuss the topic of reflexive ethnography. Ethnomusicologists today engage in all of the forms of research that we have discussed. While interpretive ethnomusicological case studies remain the most common form of research, some of the richest work uses the data from a field site or archival sources to develop broader insights, and primarily theoretical works continue to be published in ethnomusicology as well (e.g. Turino 2008; Berger 2010; Koskoff 2014; Rice 2017). To prepare the ground for the discussion of individual theoretical traditions and topic areas, we need to go deeper into the nature of theory and theoretical practice, understanding their various elements and the work that they do in ethnomusicology.

Introduction  7

The Nature of Theory Theoretical work may be densely textured with highly technical arguments, specialized terminology, and the painstaking analysis of data, but the origin of all theory, we maintain, is everyday experience. A topic like race in music or the problem of temporality in performance only becomes a compelling focus of research because writers and their audiences find something in their experience that is alluring, confusing, painful, or problematic. In the past, students were typically drawn to ethnomusicology because they were intrigued by an unfamiliar musical style, but today it is just as common that the power of a familiar music or the impact of music on some other domain of social life—politics or psychology, economics or sports—piques an individual’s interest. And everyday life doesn’t merely spark our initial curiosity; it establishes the first ground rules of our thinking and sets the terms of debate for our initial encounters. Reading for the first time a theorist like Alfred Schütz or Judith Butler, the student may be partially unaware of the intellectual history from which these authors are emerging, the rivals or interlocutors to whom they are responding, and the larger projects they are pursuing. Though lacking in these key contexts and susceptible to misunderstanding, the reader new to a text can only gain her initial purchase on words like time, gender, or performance because they have some prior meaning for her in everyday social interaction. While theoretical writings often come out of a highly refined discourse that has developed over generations and seek to transform everyday thinking, technical definitions often carry with them at least a hint of quotidian usage, and, ultimately, mundane language and practice is the implicit ground upon which concepts are developed. To carry the geological metaphor further, we would emphasize that this terrain is far from uniform and constantly changing. The everyday experiences of class or gender, ritual or play, vary from culture to culture and time period to time period, giving differing readerships differing starting points for understanding theoretical issues. And even if everyday practices around the world and across historical periods were always the same, each reader would come to understand those practices through the historically and culturally particular constellation of discourses alive in the world around her, many of which come from social theory itself. In contemporary North America, the discourse of coffee shop conversations and op-ed pages on economics and politics is threaded through with ideas from romantic nationalism, structural-functionalism, neoliberalism, and social democracy in a messy hodgepodge, even when the conversationalists or editorialists have never heard of Johann Herder, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Friedrich Hayek, or Karl Polanyi. The film maker George Lucas actively drew on Joseph Campbell’s work in crafting Star Wars.10 Likewise, while the screenwriters of the 1990s Star Trek television series may not have read the work of anthropologists Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict, their cultural-and-personality school ideas about ritual and culture run through every Klingon episode of those shows. Even if everyday life was the same everywhere and one single discourse prevailed among our species, the ground of everyday life would always be shifting because there is always a slippage between language and practice. Theory tries to make sense of this messy reality. Interposed between the motley, contradictory mass of discourses in everyday life and the highly refined conceptual systems of social and cultural theory is the paradigm—the shared understandings that a group of scholars possess. Here, we use the idea of paradigm in a broad and encompassing way to mean something like a worldview or cultural perspective, including both explicit theoretical statements as well as implicit understandings and practices that inform research. Our scholarship emerges from a paradigm because research is a kind of social activity, and paradigms are the implicit worldview of the social practice of research. The concept of paradigm attained wide currency with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argued that seminal works

8  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

establish a program of research by defining basic terms and concepts, setting out research methods, and articulating key research questions. The work that follows is what he called “normal science” (10)—research that incrementally contributes to the paradigm that seminal works articulate. Eventually, the incremental advance of normal science reveals the limits or contradictions of the paradigm, Kuhn argued, which leads to a scientific revolution, new paradigms, and new procedures for research. Crucially, paradigms include sets of assumptions that researchers possess about the world, which are only implicit in their thinking and are largely outside of awareness. It would be hard to contradict the view that researchers operate within paradigmatic visions, and the Kuhnian dynamic of paradigm, normal science, and revolution was highly effective in describing the history of at least some of the natural sciences, with physics being the ideal case. Tim Rice ([1987] 2017) has argued that, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Alan ­Merriam’s Anthropology of Music served as ethnomusicology’s dominant ­paradigm. ­Emphasizing the use of field methods to understand “conceptualization about music, behavior in relation to music, and music sound itself ” (Merriam 1964: 32, quoted in Rice [1987] 2017: 43), Merriam’s explicit theoretical framework and his broad, ­paradigmatic vision shaped the mainstream of work done in the discipline. Though ethnomusicology has changed in many ways since the mid-1960s, scholars in the field continue to ­produce a large number of ­interpretive ethnographies of musical meaning—studies that use ­participant-observation fieldwork to understand local experiences of music. In practice, this kind of research involves a range of activities, including interviews and the careful observation and recording of day-to-day musical events and the social life that surrounds them. ­Ethnomusicologists doing interpretive ethnography engage intensively with artists and their audiences, and some play music with their research participants in order to better grasp the intricacies of their performing tradition. As we discuss further below, the methods used in interpretive ethnomusicological ethnography have expanded greatly in the twenty-first century to ­include ethnographic work over the Internet, historical ethnomusicology, and a range of other approaches. While interpretive ethnography is no longer the sine qua non of ethnomusicology and competing visions abound in the discipline today, we would argue that an ethnographic vision, if not ethnographic methods, is the lingua franca of our discipline. Emerging from a foundation in everyday life and the broad vision of paradigm, theory sets the stage for empirical inquiry and shapes every part of a scholar’s research project. Below, we will sketch out the elements of research methods, but what interests us here is the way that paradigms, theories, and programs of research implicate one another. To articulate a research project, one must define a set of concepts and at least provisionally imagine how the phenomena that those concepts identify play out in the world. Claims about the nature of social life are built up from underlying concepts and have their utility in pointing to new research, while the value of any concept is how it leads to new insights and new approaches. In elaborating a theoretical orientation, a scholar may start with any one of these elements and work her way out to the others. For example, Blacking’s best known theoretical study centers on the eponymous question How Musical is Man? (1973), and across the lectures that comprise that often cited book, he articulates a series of concepts (“humanly organized sound,” “soundly organized humanity”) and a program of research that charges scholars with understanding the role of music in producing a humane society. Central to Charles Keil’s thought is the concept of “participatory discrepancies,” small differences in timing, pitch, or timbre among the parts performed by an ensemble. His theoretical writings elaborate the idea that the presence of participatory discrepancies in music encourage the listener’s active involvement, and he urges researchers to identify the unique ways that such features operate in each music culture. (See Keil’s chapters in Keil and Feld [1994] and Keil [1995]; on Keil and the wider theoretical literature on participation, see

Introduction  9

Rahaim, this volume). In a widely cited essay, Deborah Wong (2014) analyzes discourses about aesthetics and music in the Western academy in order to argue that we can have more culturally relevant and theoretically resonant research if we take sound, rather than music, as our object of study. And what is true of individual theoretical writings is equally true of scholarly discourses as a whole. The many responses to Keil’s theory (Cowdery et al. 1995) begin variously by questioning his basic terms, problematizing his claims about the effect of participatory discrepancies, or pointing to alternative lines of research, and they move from there to trace trajectories toward any of the other elements. Theories can vary considerably in the scope of the data for which they account. Some identify patterns unique to particular kinds of social groups (e.g. popular music scenes or diasporic communities), while others are meant to apply universally. Further, theories vary in the level of social scale that they address, with some focusing on micro-social phenomena like face-to-face interaction and others exploring social phenomena on the level of small-scale communities, large-scale societies, or global processes. Many theories seek to understand the relationships between the micro and macro—for example, the ways in which situated acts of music making may impact the political life of a country or community, or the way that power relations at play in an entire society may shape finegrained elements of individual experience. An influential theoretical work on the notion of social scale in ethnomusicology is Mark Slobin’s Subcultural Sounds, which extended the older idea of music subcultures to explore the complex relationships among subcultures, “supercultures,” and “intercultures” ([1993] 2000). Historical time depth is an equally important issue for theoretical generalization. Some studies may operate in what is often referred to as the “ethnographic present,” treating the period of the scholar’s fieldwork as a more or less uniform historical moment and developing theoretical generalizations that do not account for historical change. Other researchers seek to explore the way that particular musical and cultural forms change over time. For example, Peter Manuel’s chapter in this book, which examines Marxism and Marxist approaches in ethnomusicology, illustrates a range of ways that scholars have theorized the place of music in the epochal transitions from feudalism to capitalism and from industrial capitalism to neo-liberal capitalism. Other scholars focus on patterns of cultural change that operate on a much smaller time frame, such as the research on the dynamics of musical revivals (Livingston 1999). In all of these cases, having a clear vision of social scale and historical time depth is central for developing a well-conceived project. The relationship between theory and data is dialectical. We go to the fieldsite or archive with paradigms, theoretical orientations, and all manner of ideas, both explicit and implicit. These factors shape how we see the world, the kinds of questions we ask, and the insights we pursue. Sometimes, new data may confirm our existing theories, but each new field experience, interview, or archival source has the potential to impinge back on our thinking, leading to new perspectives, new insights, and new questions. Those just starting out in research often operate at the ends of this continuum: in some periods of their work, they collect information that does little more than support well-established claims; these periods can be punctuated by stretches of time in which the researcher is overwhelmed by powerful new experiences that call into question her most basic assumptions. More seasoned scholars are able to find interesting implications in the most seemingly confirmatory data and manage the flow of new information without feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes, the most powerful implications of new data only become apparent in hindsight, while seemingly revolutionary findings may later turn out to be explained by conventional ideas. Whatever the pace and intensity that one finds in the interplay between theory and data, yesterday’s data bring new insights today, which changes the way one gathers new information tomorrow, creating back-and-forth exchanges that continue throughout one’s career.11

10  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

Setting these dynamics in a broader context, we see that every element of our thinking and writing is dialectical. Experiences from our everyday lives have the potential to change our theoretical assumptions and our understanding of the data we find in the field or in the ethnographies that we read. Fieldwork and theory change our understanding of everyday lives, within and beyond the academy. Our thinking alters as we work through new ideas with colleagues and friends, and as we engage in dialog across disciplinary boundaries. And most importantly, many of our deepest insights come from our ongoing interactions with our research participants.

Theory and Method The term method refers to the process by which research is conducted, and the word methodology denotes the study of method and its broader implications.12 Like the relationship between theory and data or the one between theory and everyday life, the relationship between theory and method is highly dialectical: method, one might quip, is theory operationalized. While the two are tightly enmeshed in any particular research project, they are analytically distinct. Method and methodology are complex and important topics. It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss theory and method together, as doing so would require us to either treat each individual topic with unfortunate brevity or produce a study that would be unwieldy in its length. Our goal in this section is to sketch out some of the broad contours of the topic of research methods in order to suggest the complex interplay between the two in ethnomusicological research. The Elements of Research Methods Paradigms and theoretical orientations set the stage for research, and, in the context of particular empirical projects, they cash out in the articulation of research assumptions, the framing of study objects, and the use of particular methods and techniques. In ethnomusicological methodology, assumptions refer to the knowledge that ethnomusicologists hold to be true at any particular moment in a research situation. While assumptions are asserted at a particular time, new data may make these assumptions subject to modification and change. In my (Stone’s) own work about music event among the Kpelle of Liberia ([1982] 2010: 7–10), I outlined eleven assumptions I was making in conducting the study, beginning with “Music is communication,” including “Meaning in music is created by participants in the course of social interaction” and “The social relationship among event participants is based upon the simultaneous experiencing of the performance in multiple dimensions of time,” and ending with, “The ethnomusicologist makes inferences about music event interaction by engaging in interactional behavior.” Statements of assumptions such as these cordon off those things that scholars take to be true, things that are not questioned at the moment they embarked on their research. It is important to identify assumptions, so that it is clear from the start what areas are not open to question—at least, to use Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann’s oft repeated phrase, “until further notice” (1973: 4). As we have seen, there are many cases where evidence may, at a later point in time, bring our unquestioned assumptions to light or make us question our implicit beliefs. But we can never make all of our assumptions explicit, even in the most richly theorized research.13 Flowing directly from the articulation of research assumptions is the definition of study object. The study object identifies the basic unit of analysis in a research project, and the range of study objects that ethnomusicologists explore is wide. In my (Stone’s) Kpelle fieldwork, I took the music event as my study object. Organizing my research in this way, I took as my primary unit of analysis a phenomenon that was salient for the people with whom I worked, which allowed my research to be more sensitive to local experiences and ideas.

Introduction  11

For Kpelle performers, the event is set apart from everyday life and is the site where sound and behavior were united in musical interaction. The Kpelle understood the area circumscribed by the boundaries of the event as the “inside” of the performance, and this was expressed in their everyday speech. In talking about music making, they would often say “Kwa loi belei su” (We are entering the inside of the performance) ([1982] 2010: 2). Taking the event as my study object, I was able to attend to the practices that establish performance as a sphere of experience—a process that would have been invisible if I had taken music sound or even music making as my study object. Once an ethnomusicologist has articulated her assumptions and established her study object, she is in a position to pose research questions. Questions frame one’s research, shaping the kinds of methods and techniques one employs, the way one engages with one’s interlocutors and makes sense of texts, and one’s practices in the field or the archive. As part of a research grant application that I (Stone) prepared, which focused on the role of spatial components (local ideas about how space is organized) in music performance, I posed the following research questions: First, how do Kpelle musicians and audience express spatial components in musical performance and what is the significance of these spatial components? … Second, how do these spatial elements interact with Kpelle ideas of time? Third, how does this spatial description serve to define Kpelle music theory? Here, I wanted to understand why people commented on singers “raising” a song or a chorus responding “underneath” a soloist. This further led to studying the predominance of terms and phrases that were oriented to issues of space and the metaphors that served to explain how music performance worked. These overarching questions then served to guide the direction of my subsequent research and led to more specific questions and decisions about the project. With research assumptions, study objects, and research questions articulated, the ethnomusicologist uses research methods to try to answer the questions she has posed. Ethnographic research for ethnomusicologists customarily involves participant-observation methods, which encompass a broad continuum of activities. At one end of the continuum, the ethnomusicologist will observe social conduct, and the scholar’s definition of study object will shape her observational practices. For example, a fieldworker whose primary study object is gender identity and performance will pay attention to the full range of conduct in a music event and will do so in a particular way; focusing on the means by which musicians and audience members perform being a women, a man, or some other gender identity, she will literally see and hear gender, with markers of those identities taking a prominent place in her experience. A fieldworker whose primary study object is the intersensory dimensions of music may certainly commit some of her attention to gender. However, she will focus her primary attention on the interaction of stage lighting and music sound, as well as the way that the moving bodies on the dance floor react to the music, and her experience of these phenomena will be far more intense than the fieldworker whose main interest is in gender performance. On the participant end of the spectrum, the fieldworker may perform as an instrumentalist, singer, or dancer in an effort to learn about details and nuances of the music as it is being created. Of course, a scholar emphasizing the participant side of the ­participant-observer continuum is an observer as well, watching and listening to the practices that transpire in the event and observing her own music making practices. Her attention will likewise be shaped by her ideas about study object and research questions, and her active participation in music making will bring new facets of the culture to light. In Liberia in 1976, I (Stone) became an apprentice to a koning (triangular frame zither) player. In the early phases of my research, I had asked my teacher, Bena-golo-kuu, many

12  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

questions about the instrument but received few answers. As I became more adept on the instrument, he described a tutelary spirit who could make my playing excellent, but he also noted that there were dangers in engaging with such a spirit and warned me that I needed to be cautious. In the abstract discussions about performance that occurred before I started my apprenticeship, he had never mentioned these aspects of the musical spirits. It was only when he thought I needed to know these ideas that he revealed this specialized knowledge (Stone [1982] 2010: 54–55). If participation leads to new opportunities for observation, that observation always involves at least a measure of participation, in the sense that all observers are at the very least present within fieldwork events, and the interplay between the two forms of research practice is a central feature of participant-observation methods. Some ethnomusicologists supplement their participant-observation fieldwork with archival research. Archival methods involve searching in online or physical repositories to understand what other scholars, musicians, critics, government officials, or ordinary people have found in the past. Newspaper accounts, diaries, letters, and photographs all constitute documents for the ethnomusicologist to draw upon. In the 1980s, Rice encouraged scholars to expand their focus beyond the ethnographic present ([1987] 2017), and his program was engaged actively. Many ethnographers supplement ethnographic fieldwork with archival research, while strictly historical studies have become common in contemporary ethnomusicology (e.g. Bohlman 2013; McCollum and Herbert 2014; and Ziegler at al. 2017). Each research method entails a wide range of techniques—particular kinds of research practices that yield particular kinds of information and insights (Kaplan 1964: 19). These include conducting interviews, making sound recordings, video recordings, or still photographs, transcribing music or speech, and the creation of fieldnotes. Each of these techniques can be carried out with a range of variations. Interview techniques include surveys (in which a fixed schedule of questions with multiple choice answers is administered to a larger number of people), semi-structured interviews (in which a set of questions has been established in advance, though the interviewer has the freedom to deviate from her script and pursue new topics as they emerge), and open-ended interviews (in which only a topic is set in advance, and the interview develops in a conversational style). Life-history interviews are used to uncover personal experience narratives and may lead to something like an ethnographic biography. In feedback interviews, the researcher plays field, archival, or commercial recordings for her research participants in order to stimulate discussion and understand their perspectives on the music (Stone and Stone 1981; Stone-MacDonald and Stone 2013). The choices that an ethnomusicologist makes about specific techniques and their variations depend on her theoretical orientation and research questions. For the present discussion, what interests us is the interplay of theory and method. If individual songs are a researcher’s study object, then music analysis will likely be her primary research method. If, on the other hand, a community is the object of study, then the research will embrace a whole range of other performances and inevitably treat the details of individual songs differently. Of course, a single study may have multiple study objects and may draw on ideas from more than one body of theory, and across the span of a single project, a scholar’s objects of study and theoretical orientations may shift. What we wish to highlight here is the interplay between theory and method, and the complex ways in which they may shape one another in individual research situations. Expanding Research Methods, New Perspectives The range of research methods and techniques that are used in the humanities and social sciences today is extremely broad. While qualitative methods continue to dominate ethnomusicology, quantitative work—such as experimental research in sound perception

Introduction  13

(e.g. McGraw and Kohnen 2016; Johansson 2017) and computational studies of large data sets of music and text on the Internet (Cornelis et al. 2013)—is also actively pursued in the contemporary scene. Perhaps the most significant developments that have come to the fore since the early 1980s are in the area of new ethnographic methods. Performance ethnography, for example, may involve experimental writing (Denzin 2003) or the development of stage productions or other artistic performances from field materials (Conquergood 2002). (The topic of performance ethnography in ethnomusicology is examined further in ­Waterman, this volume.) In reflexive ethnography, the scholar discusses her interpretations and analyses with her research participants as they emerge in the field and returns to the fieldsite to share her conclusions with her collaborators or to document changes in the context over time (Burawoy 2003). Such work allows for a sharing of authority between the fieldworker and research participants, a dialogic back-and-forth between all of the parties involved. In these kinds of approaches, the ethnographer actively acknowledges the role of local people in the study that is published (e.g. Berger 1999) and may list key research participants as co-authors, as Jocelyne Guilbault did in her book Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (Guilbault, with Averill, Benoit, and Rabess 1993) and her ethnomusicological biography of the soca musician Roy Cape (Guilbault and Cape 2014). Closely related are decolonized approaches like indigenous ethnography (Smith 1999) and border ethnography (Vila 2000), where ideas about social categories, space, and identity are treated as fluid concepts for exploration. While people have always traveled throughout the world, most early ethnographers focused on communities that were situated in a single locale. Increasingly, ethnomusicologists conduct multi-site research for a single study, particularly in cases of urban-rural movement, transnational migration, travel, or the involuntary circulation of peoples due to war or other conflicts (e.g. Shelemay 1998; Solomon 2009; Helbig 2014; Rapport 2014). Contemporary ethnomusicologists recognize that people move consistently from place to place and that to understand this requires a kind of ethnography “in motion” (see Hahn 2010). Internet mediation has transformed both music making and the ethnography of ­music. Technology has enabled scholars to conduct research via the Internet, where they do not engage people face-to-face in a shared physical space, but rather carry out research ­remotely, in what is known as virtual ethnography. This new terrain both expands possibilities and entails a range of new challenges. For example, Kiri Miller’s 2012 study Playing Along examines a wide variety of ways in which music has been transformed by technological mediation—from the place of music soundtracks in video games to those video games, like Guitar Hero, that take virtual music performance as their focus, and from gaming cultures that cross the virtual/real-world divide to the purely virtual communities that emerge around online music lessons (see also Cheng 2014). Internet mediation has also transformed the product of ethnographic research. Contemporary scholars often enhance their ethnographies by annotating their video data and including it in online repositories, like the Ethnographic Video for Analysis and Instruction (EVIA) digital archive, where the material is much more widely accessible than would otherwise be possible. ­ usic While many of the early writings in ethnomusicology focused on the analysis of m sound and, later, on musical performance in communities, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to ethnographic work on social individuals. Building on earlier studies such as Navajo Blessingway Singer: The Autobiography of Frank Mitchell, 1881–1967 ­(Frisbie and ­McAllester 1978) and Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women (Vander 1988), such work often begins with the musical practices of a single person and moves outward to show how her experiences shed light on the social life of a community or larger historical processes (e.g. Rice 1994; Danielson 1997; Lohman 2010; Ruskin and Rice 2012; Guilbault and Cape 2014). And in the methodology of autoethnography

14  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

(Reed-Danahay 1997), the ethnographer’s memories of her own personal experiences may serve as the raw data for interpretation and analysis (Bartleet and Ellis 2009; Castro 2016). As Jayson Beaster-Jones, who was interpreting the ideas about fieldwork in anthropology developed by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997), remarked to us recently, “the field” isn’t only a place, and fieldwork means far more than research in a distant locale; rather, fieldwork is a way of seeing the world and making sense of social phenomena.

Approaching Intellectual History Like other professions, academic disciplines are sometimes characterized as what George Bernard Shaw called “conspiracies against the laity” ([1906] 2011: 39). In this view, disciplines are intellectual silos that do little more than stifle thinking and limit creativity. Disciplinary boundaries can serve a limiting function, but we believe that this is not their only effect. To modify slightly a common bit of phraseology from practice theory, we would suggest that disciplines both constrain and enable thinking, and we argue that the rejection of disciplines smacks of a naïve individualism, one that neglects the social and dialogic nature of research and confuses intellectual community with intellectual conformity. Ethnomusicology is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field, and the conversations that emerged at its founding were highly creative, even daring for their time. While we would never want to live in world where we only read the work of ethnomusicologists, we would be equally impoverished without the depth of thinking that has come from situating ourselves within a conversation that has developed over the span of decades and within a contemporary community of interlocutors and colleagues. Like most disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, ours certainly bears a colonial legacy. The weight of this legacy cannot be dismissed lightly, and the attempts to decolonize the field, which are discussed in several chapters in this book, are of vital importance to our discipline. But to see ethnomusicology as irredeemably colonial is to neglect both the real contributions that scholars in our field have made and to deny our potential for development and growth. At its best, the discipline of ethnomusicology has provided its practitioners with intellectual tools, research ­methods, and a community of interlocutors. No project can cover an infinite number of topics, thinkers, or discourses, and, by necessity, we have had to set boundaries to frame our discussion. But throughout the text, we have seen these boundaries as ­permeable—­h istorically emergent, constantly open to new engagements, and through their very permeability p­ roductive of new insights and perspectives. If academic disciplines offer the researcher both pitfalls and potentials, how are we best to understand their dynamics? At first blush, disciplines seem to be defined by their study objects. Astronomers, it appears, study stars and zoologists study animals, but nowhere, not even in the natural sciences, do study objects neatly separate the disciplines from one another. The boundary between chemistry and physics has been contested for hundreds of years, and in the humanities and social sciences the lines between disciplines are even harder to draw. What would it mean to say that anthropologists study anthropos (“man”) while sociologists study society? A more productive way of understanding disciplines is to see them first and foremost as social groups, ones that are bound together less by their unique claim on an object of study and more by discourses, institutions, histories, and patterns of practice—debates and conflicts as much as shared assumptions or topics. Anthropology and sociology are distinct from one another because one group of people self-identify as anthropologists and another as sociologists, each with their own histories, canons of scholarly literature, departments or programs, sets of research methods, conferences, journals, and book series—not because “man” and society are distinct objects in the world.14 And the interdisciplinary linkages between those disciplines, as found in combined departments of

Introduction  15

sociology and anthropology, are linkages precisely because people read, write, teach, and interact through and across those boundaries. If we understand disciplines best by focusing on social practices of thinking and writing, rather than reified study objects, a similar approach applies to theoretical traditions, as well. At a first order of approximation, theoretical traditions and their intellectual histories can be organized into linear narratives that start with a founder or small group of founders and are developed through branching groups of descendants. To come to a deeper understanding, one needs a different perspective, and in many ways theoretical traditions are like musical genres. Certainly, some musicians fit unambiguously within particular genre categories. Few would deny that Chuck Berry was a rock and roll performer, not only because his music has all of the features that are associated with this genre, but also because he explicitly references the genre in his music, worked to forward rock and roll as a musical movement, and was categorized that way by both supporters and critics. While figures like Berry are easy to identify with specific genres, many do not fit easily into a single category. Much of the creative work of music making comes in drawing together a diverse set of stylistic traditions from multiple histories and cultures—Berry himself, of course, was deeply rooted in the blues and was well familiar with country music—and many musicians’ styles change over time. Most importantly, listeners use genre labels as frameworks for making sense of music, and they do so in ways that fit the immediate situation and larger-scale contexts. For all of these reasons, it is less productive to fixate on music genres as discrete categories into which music must be fit and more useful to understand them as interpretive frameworks that people use to produce and make sense of music in situated interaction. The same is true of theoretical work. Some scholars fit unambiguously into one intellectual tradition or another—Husserl was a phenomenologist; Lévi-Strauss was a ­structuralist— and many are self-conscious in their efforts to found or forward a particular school of thought. Others, however, draw creatively on multiple sources, take varying approaches across the span of their careers, and can be interpreted in a range of ways. Even when a single scholar seeks nothing more than to contribute incrementally to an established movement or tradition, the development of any set of ideas by a group of researchers inevitable leads toward contradiction and change, if not transformation or rupture. To evoke a trope from contemporary computer interface design, tags are a better metaphor for disciplines than folder hierarchies. At a first order of approximation, one can hardly avoid thinking in terms of theoretical movements and intellectual lineages. We gain deeper understandings, however, if we examine the particularity and situatedness of social and cultural theory and the dialogic relations that scholars have with their interlocutors, rather than rigidly trying to develop tree diagrams with fixed schools of thought, founders, and followers. This book has been developed with those ideas in mind. Each chapter takes one or two theoretical traditions or topic areas as its focus. Exploring theoretical work from within and beyond ethnomusicology, as well as a range of ethnographic and historical case studies that have theoretical implications, each chapter sketches some of the intellectual history of the tradition or area in question, places it in its social and intellectual context, discusses its most resonant ideas, explores how ethnomusicologists have contributed to, taken up, or transformed those ideas, and suggests emerging areas of research. To reach toward fuller, more dialogic understandings, each chapter discusses the interactions among traditions, with forward and backward references to relevant passages in other chapters. Text boxes point the way toward further connections. The scholarship discussed in this book spans a period of about one hundred years and traces a variety of intellectual trajectories within the history of ethnomusicology; however, the book is not in any way intended as a history of the discipline.15 While Chapter 1 discusses some of the oldest theoretical traditions in the book, no linear or progressive development of ideas is implied in the order of the book’s

16  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

chapters. Organized as a coherent whole, the book may be profitably read straight through from beginning to end, but its chapters may also be read without difficulty as stand-alone essays or in an alternative sequence. Jayson Beaster-Jones begins the book with a history of linguistic and semiotic approaches in ethnomusicology. A complex and wide-ranging piece, it starts by examining the ideas of the Swiss scholar of language and sign systems, Ferdinand de Saussure, and explores the varied ways that theories of language and meaning have been engaged in the ethnomusicology. Discussing the work of Noam Chomsky, the broad ranging theoretical tradition of structuralism, the writings of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and a variety of “language-in-use perspectives,” Beaster-Jones shows how contemporary ethnomusicologists understand music and language as systems of communication and meaning making, pointing the way to powerful new ideas about social life and culture. The next four chapters focus on theoretical traditions or topic areas that center in critical research. Peter Manuel’s chapter looks at the Marxist tradition in social and cultural theory, with particular attention to music’s place in political economy and the cultural industries. Jane ­Sugarman discusses theories of gender and sexuality and the ways that they have been addressed in ethnomusicology. Marxism is a diverse but relatively well-bounded intellectual movement, but scholars from a wide array of intellectual traditions have examined the topic of gender and sexuality. Sugarman’s chapter is particularly important, as it introduces a wide range of crucial intellectual movements and ideas, including the critique of the subject in post-structuralism and the notions of performativity and intersectionality. In so doing, it sets the stage for much of the work that is done in the chapters that follow. Critical research on gender and sexually is diverse. Equally varied is the critical research on race and ethnicity, which is the topic Maureen Mahon’s chapter, and the work on globalization and post-­colonialism, which is examined in the chapter by Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton. Critical research on these topics became a pivotal part of the ethnomusicology of the 1990s and continues actively in the field today. The initial examination of cultural studies appears in Manuel’s Marxism chapter, and further discussion of cultural studies thinkers are threaded throughout the other chapters in this group. The next four chapters discuss a mix of theoretical movements, topic areas, and new interdisciplinary partners that have more recently come into prominence in ethnomusicology. Highly influential in the humanities and humanistic social sciences is performance studies, an academic discipline with four distinct but inter-related intellectual traditions. Ellen Waterman’s chapter makes sense of this complex history and explores the way that theories of performance have been carried forward in contemporary ethnomusicology. Her chapter also examines the closely related field of critical studies in improvisation. ­A nother interdisciplinary area that has seen enormous growth in recent years is sound studies. ­Ethnomusicologists have taken the lead in theorizing sound, many of whom now see the sonic, rather than the musical, as their primary study object. Katherine Meizel and J. ­Martin Daughtry’s chapter examines these developments, as well as the related area of voice studies. Phenomenology is an intellectual movement that began in Continental ­European philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century and has had an impact on almost every humanities discipline and many of the social sciences as well. Ethnomusicologists began to engage phenomenology in the 1980s, and my (Berger’s) chapter explores this tradition. Finally, thinkers since the time of Plato have been fascinated by the notion of participation. In the twentieth century, a diverse group of scholars, artists, and activists have examined this topic, either celebrating its liberatory potentials or issuing warning about its perils. Ethnomusicologists have been at the forefront here, and Matthew Rahaim’s chapter discusses classical Greek ideas about participation, the wide range of scholars who have explored this topic in the twentieth century, and its place in contemporary ethnomusicology.

Introduction  17

While each of the book’s chapters explores a different topic, one can find related tendencies and trajectories in the histories that they trace, and it will be worthwhile to note these commonalities here at the outset. One of these trajectories is a movement from scholarship that explains social practices or cultural products by reference to universal cognitive processes, to scholarship that explains such phenomena by reference to cultural context (often in a relativistic, value neutral sense of that word), and finally to scholarship that shows how social practices or cultural forms are shaped by relations of power. The first transition could be characterized as a shift from essentialism to social construction, while the later transition is a shift toward critical research, in the sense of that term that we developed above. A second trajectory involves the transition from scholarship that posits abstract, decontextualized mental systems or texts to scholarship that attends to situated, embodied practice.16 A third trajectory—more like a peripatetic movement—involves changing levels of focus. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dominated by theories of sweeping global or historical scope, while the mid-twentieth century saw the rise of theoretical attention to small-scale social phenomena and arguments about the cultural or political significance of the micro-level. With the advent of globalization, theories at the macro-scale returned to prominence in the 1990s. Finally, the book’s chapters observe a trajectory from what Waterman has, in personal communication, dubbed “a faith in analytic omniscience” (the confidence that the theorist can provide unique access to fundamental social processes) to “critical reflection” (an awareness that all theoretical work is situated in and profoundly shaped by its practitioner’s social and cultural contexts). These trajectories describe some of the directions that social and cultural theory has taken in the Western academy since ethnomusicology was founded, but there is another set of trajectories that needs to be mentioned here as well—our contributors’ trajectories through these literatures. Social and cultural theory is vast, and none of the individual bodies of work that the contributors discuss could be summarized in a single chapter. Working through this book, it is best for the reader to think of each chapter as one path that an individual author has made through this body of work—not a comprehensive overview, but one way of identifying the landmarks in this terrain and mapping its contours. Understood in this way, the chapters will, we hope, serve as a model that the reader can use for approaching other bodies of social and cultural theory that she cares about. And what is true of each individual chapter is true of the book as a whole. We have regretted passing over many tantalizing writers and important theoretical ­approaches in order to give more detailed accounts of a smaller number of intellectual movements and themes. For example, we have devoted little attention to the scholarship that has emerged at the meeting place of ethnomusicology and cognitive science (e.g. Clayton, Dueck, and Leante 2013) or ethnomusicology and affect theory (Hofman 2015; Garcia 2015; Gill 2017), and we have not explored the growing subdisciplines of medical e­ thnomusicology (Koen et al. 2008) or the ethnomusicology of childhood (Marsh 2008; Campbell and ­Wiggins 2012). Finally, we have devoted only limited attention to applied ethnomusicology, an important domain of scholarly practice which can engage almost any of the theoretical currents alive in our field today and which has a body of theoretical work of its own (e.g. Pettan and Titon 2015). Ultimately, though, these regrets set into relief the pleasure we have found in exploring new ideas, and we have approached the work of this book with delight. *** A common and erroneous idea in our field is that ethnomusicologists do not generate theory of our own. Rather, this line of thinking suggests, we only borrow theory from other fields, applying whatever ideas are fashionable as a kind of intellectual window dressing to

18  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone

the descriptive and interpretive projects that are our true métier. From that perspective, a book on social and cultural theory in ethnomusicology would find that the movement of ideas only flowed in one direction—from Theory (Philosophy? Sociology? Anthropology?) to ethnomusicology. While there certainly are works in our field that use theory in this manner, such a view fundamentally misunderstands both the work that ethnomusicologists have done and the nature of the theoretical enterprise. We observed in the Preface that the questions that social and cultural theory examines were once the domain of philosophy, sociology, and anthropology but have, over time, been taken up by scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as a range of related fields of endeavor. With this in mind, we would emphasize that while social philosophy and social theory remain vibrant subdisciplines in philosophy, sociology, and anthropology, in today’s academy they are only part of a much larger discourse that transcends individual disciplines. The situation that ethnomusicologists face is, therefore, no different than that of scholars in any other field—philosophy, sociology, and anthropology no less than cultural studies, performance studies, gender studies, or any of the other newer disciplines: all of us come from an intellectual history formed by a discipline or a cluster of related disciplines. All of us work to make sense of the vast set of theoretical conversations about the nature of social life and culture. And, if we seek to make the most powerful kinds of contributions, all of us must think about how our individual projects add to that broadly transdisciplinary conversation or its many interdisciplinary threads. Making this kind of contribution is a daunting task, but it is no less daunting for a philosopher, sociologist, or anthropologist than it is for an ethnomusicologist, and each of the contributors to this book has emphasized the important contributions that scholars in our field have made.17 We use the older term “contribution,” rather than the more contemporary term “intervention” very intentionally here. On a basic level, the word “intervention” smacks of clinical psychology—a group of friends and family members, led by a therapist or counselor, who tries to compel an addict to acknowledge her addiction. Clearly, ethnomusicology is not some junkie waiting for a theorist to scream, “Enough!” More insidious and damaging than this distasteful image are the neo-liberal resonances of the word “intervention” and its much uglier partner, “disruption.” Neo-liberals from the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics celebrated the “creative destruction” of the rebel capitalists who “disrupted” established patterns of economic production—Randian figures who bravely threw buggy whip manufacturers out of work so that the Model-T could be born. In place of this individualistic and competitive vision, we would prefer to see theoretical work as a fundamentally social practice, something we do with others, both within and beyond the academy. It’s an activity in which ideas may need to be challenged or rejected, sometimes vigorously so, but always in the spirit of solidarity with others in the intellectual enterprise—something that is never a zero-sum game. Ethnomusicologists and ethnomusicology can make important contributions to that enterprise. Working together, the authors of the book have shown some of the ways that ethnomusicologists have done so in the past and suggest some of the paths to new contributions in the future. Let’s do it together.

Notes 1 Theoretical work in ethnomusicology has long been influenced by social and cultural anthropology, particularly in ethnomusicology’s early years, and it will be useful to briefly sketch out some of the relevant intellectual history of anthropology here. The development of cultural anthropology in the twentieth century is typically characterized as a progression through a series of dominant theoretical ­orientations—first cultural evolutionism, then functionalism, structural-functionalism (see note 15), structuralism (discussed in Beaster-Jones, this volume), and interpretive anthropology. As the story is usually told, this history culminates in the 1980s with a period of intense self-criticism about

Introduction  19 anthropology’s complicity in colonialism, its research method of ethnographic fieldwork, and its modes writing, which together are referred to as the “crisis of representation.” Here, classic texts like Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1995), and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1996) drew attention to the colonial viewpoints embedded in the field and the inescapably political dimensions of representation in ethnography. The result of the crisis was the emergence of diversity of approaches that have been variously labeled as “post-modernism” or “post-structuralism.” Post-colonial theory, which is discussed by ­Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton’s chapter in this volume, is also linked to this representational crisis.   While a concern with local perspectives had long been of interest to anthropologists, it became the primary preoccupation of interpretive anthropology, most famously developed by Clifford Geertz (1973) and Victor Turner (1974). A focus on local perspectives on music making has for many years served as the hallmark of ethnomusicology as well, and for this reason we have chosen to discuss it here in the book’s introduction. We have decided not to devote a chapter to post-modernism and post-structuralism, as the former term has been used with decreasing frequency after the 1990s and the historical impact of the later is extraordinarily complex. There is no question that the major post-structuralist thinkers have been of the first importance to contemporary social and cultural theory. However, scholars today hold a range of opinions about whether or not the term “post-­ structuralism” refers to a unified intellectual movement or a diverse cluster of approaches and tendencies. Further, post-structuralism itself was and continues to be highly interdisciplinary. Many of its most important theorists were philosophers, historians, and literary scholars—thinkers whose ideas had to be adapted or expanded to bear fruit in an ethnographic context. In this book, we have chosen to present the initial discussion of post-structuralist theories in the chapter on gender and sexuality, which is written by Jane Sugarman, not because the post-structuralists were uniquely concerned with gender (though some of them were), but because post-structuralism has been used so productively in music disciplines to address this topic. The chapters by Wallach and Clinton and by Waterman also discuss this topic. On post-modernity, see Manuel (this volume). 2 On Geertz and the relationship between his work and the anthropology of gender, see Sugarman (this volume). On the role of Geertz’s work in performance studies, see Waterman (this volume). 3 This idea has its roots in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology and has been most richly developed in ethnomusicology by the classic ethnographies Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (Titon 1988) and May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Rice 1994). See the chapter on phenomenological ethnomusicology (Berger, this volume) for further discussion. 4 It is worth dispelling a potential point of terminological confusion here. As James Bohman has observed ([2005] 2016), scholars use the term critical theory in a narrow sense to refer to a highly influential body of Marxist writings developed by scholars working at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2007), Herbert Marcuse ([1964] 1991), and Eric Fromm ([1961] 2003), as well as their intellectual descendants, such as Jürgen Habermas (1981). In a less technical sense, though, the term critical theory is used to refer to any kind of theoretical work that seeks to critique power relations. (The related terms critical scholarship and critical research are often used in this non-technical sense as well.) This book will use critical theory to refer to the work of the Frankfurt School, which is discussed in Manuel (this volume), and critical scholarship or critical research to refer to any kind of theory that engages in social criticism. 5 It is worth noting that while many ethnomusicologists are committed to social criticism, far fewer engage in aesthetic criticism ( judging the artistic merits of individual works or genres) as part of their ethnomusicological practice. The situation is more complex than it may seem. At a first level of approximation, almost all contemporary ethnomusicologists would agree that it is not the job of an ethnomusicologist to rate any performance, genre, or music culture as superior to any other. Aesthetic relativism is the foundation of almost every North American undergraduate survey course on the musics of the world taught by trained ethnomusicologists, who almost universally seek to counter the ethnocentric view that musics outside the Western conservatory tradition are primitive or unsophisticated. No ethnomusicological ethnography of which we are aware contains anything like journalistic record reviews—giving this album a 4 stars and that one 2.5—though many ethnomusicologists seek to understand the aesthetic criticisms that their research participants make. But politics and aesthetics can be hard to disentangle. In the work of ethnomusicologists who emphasize the ways in which music can serve as a medium for social relations and who seek to engage social criticism, there can be an implicit dimension of aesthetic critique, albeit one that is to varying degrees hidden. For example, in differing ways both Charles Keil (Keil 1979; Keil, Keil, and Blau 1992) and John Blacking (1973) argue that the music of their research participants represents a kind of ideal way for people to be

20  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone together, implicitly or explicitly contrasting it with what they see as the stultifying and hierarchical relations constituted in the Western concert hall. Unless otherwise noted, we will use the terms critical scholarship and critical research to refer to social criticism, rather than aesthetic criticism. See note 4 on the differing sense of the term critical theory. 6 The relative paucity of critical scholarship in early American ethnomusicology and its allied fields is a topic ripe for investigation. In a highly provocative article, Susan Davis (2010) shows how the mid-twentieth century America folklorist Benjamin Botkin was harassed by the FBI and other a­ nti-communist forces for his critical scholarship and was marginalized within the field of folklore studies. Davis argues that the full effect of US anti-communism on the discipline of folklore is not known. There is good reason to believe, she argues, that critical folkloristics has much deeper roots than is often acknowledged, and she calls for more research in the intellectual history of the discipline to recuperate this work. We would suggest that a similar project would be beneficial in ethnomusicology as well. 7 The intellectual history of the turn toward critical scholarship in the ethnomusicology of the 1990s is evocatively discussed in Deborah Wong’s important 2006 article, “Ethnomusicology and Difference.” 8 While we have discussed these three forms of theory (theory that stands aloof from social criticism, theoretical work of critique, and theoretical work of activist scholarship) in series, we do not want to imply a historical progression or hierarchy of values here. Scholars from all three camps have made significant contributions to contemporary discourses, and the relationship among them is complex. A scholar who pursues the first kind of theoretical work, for example, may have a principled opposition to critical or activist theoretical work, or she may respect critical forms of theory but simply feel that her strengths or interests lie in other areas. Scholars deeply committed to one approach may freely borrow ideas from the other camps, and across the span of a single career, a scholar may shift from one approach to another. 9 See Guilbault and Cape (2014: 1–22) for a rich discussion of this literature. 10 See Seastrom (2015). It is worth noting in passing that Campbell’s writings have been widely criticized in folklore studies (e.g. Dundes 2005). 11 In the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology, the back-and-forth interplay in meaning making between past and present, or between parts and wholes, is sometimes referred to as the hermeneutic circle, though this term has a wide range of other meanings as well. For further discussion of the hermeneutic circle, see Berger (2015). Hermeneutic phenomenology is also discussed in Berger (this volume). On the dialectics of theory and data, see Berger (2004). 12 The literature on methodologies of ethnographic fieldwork and writing is substantial. Classic and contemporary works include The Ethnographic Interview (Spradley 1979), Participant Observation (­Spradley 1980), People Studying People (Georges and Jones 1980), Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), Women’s Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1995), Analyzing Social Settings (Lofland et al. 2005), Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 2011), and Tales of the Field (Van Maanen 2010). (On the place of Writing Culture and Women Writing Culture in the history of anthropology, see note 1 in this chapter.) Perhaps the most influential study of methodology from within the discipline of ethnomusicology is Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley’s Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008). On historical methods in ethnomusicology, see McCollum and Herbert (2014) and Ziegler et al. (2017). 13 Reading research proposals over the years, I (Stone) have often observed that scholars sometimes confuse assumptions and research questions. In such a situation, the scholar will begin by describing certain assumptions about a body of music to be studied. As the research questions are presented, however, it very quickly becomes evident that a concept stated as an assumption is also being posed as a research question. While unexpected data may eventually force the scholar to question one of her basic assumptions, the scholar must, from the start, be clear about how she is situating her investigation and must separate assumptions from research questions. 14 The anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997: 2) make a related point when they argue that the study objects of anthropology and other social science disciplines are not sharply separated from one another, and what defines their field is not its object of study but rather its methodology—a commitment to fieldwork. 15 A variety of scholars have written on the disciplinary history of ethnomusicology, including Merriam (1969), Nettl (1979, 2010), Nettl and Bohlman (1991), and Ziegler (2010). For a review of additional sources on this topic, see Nettl (2010: xvi).   Given the book’s focus on the contemporary discipline, we have chosen not to devote chapters to theoretical traditions that are no longer actively pursued in the field today. It will, however, be worthwhile to talk briefly about two clusters of theory that shaped thinking about music and culture in the predecessor discipline to ethnomusicology (the comparative musicology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and in ethnomusicology’s early years.

Introduction  21   Analyzing recordings and instruments brought back to Europe by Western explorers, the scholars who established the discipline of comparative musicology in the late nineteenth century sought to make sense of the diverse musical systems of the world’s peoples. The theoretical foundations of their work came from the anthropology of the day: cultural evolutionism (which posited a linear development from unsophisticated “primitives” to “civilized” Europeans) and diffusionism (which sought to trace the history of the movement of culture traits among “primitive” societies). While early comparative musicology was a complex and highly interdisciplinary endeavor, its practitioners were products of their time. Like the anthropologists from whom they derived their theoretical paradigms, their work was deeply colonial in its outlook. They imagined non-Western peoples as “living ancestors”— unsophisticated primitives stuck an earlier phase of cultural development. Within both anthropology and ethnomusicology, cultural evolutionism and the diffusionist approaches of the late nineteenth century have been thoroughly discredited. On the history of comparative musicology, see especially Nettl and Bohlman (1991), as well as some of the original source readings in Shelemay (1990a, 1990b). It is worth noting that some contemporary scholars have sought to revive the discipline of comparative musicology, albeit stripped of its colonial visions (e.g. Savage and Brown 2013, Giannattasio and Giuriati 2017).   In anthropology, cultural evolutionism and diffusionism gave way to functionalism (e.g. ­Malinowski 1925) and later structural-functionalism (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown 1933, Bascom 1954), which ­understood culture as a complex system of interacting parts that allowed societies to maintain social cohesion and reproduce themselves over time. The theoretical generalizations made by functionalists and ­structural-functionalism in anthropology and ethnomusicology were often based on data collected in detailed fieldwork, and the ideas that they developed could be highly complex. But imagining non-Western peoples as fundamentally static, treating social conflict as fundamentally dysfunctional, and ­subordinating the agency of situated actors to the imperatives of social stability, functionalism and structural-functionalism likewise betrayed a colonial perspective. Structural-functionalism was central to social and cultural anthropology throughout the mid-twentieth century; while it was never a ­dominant theoretical orientation within ethnomusicology, its ideas influenced a number of writings in the field. Elements of structural-functionalism can be found in Merriam’s Anthropology of Music (1964), as well as articles like Waterman (1956).   No contemporary scholar would explicitly support cultural evolutionism, the diffusionism of ­n ineteenth-century anthropology, or structural-functionalism, but many would argue that elements of a colonial viewpoint are still at play in the field today. In that context, scholars of many kinds seek to decolonize ethnomusicology, exposing and eradicating the elements of colonial thinking that ­remain in the field’s theory and practice. 16 On theories of embodiment, see Text Box 1.1. On practice theory, see Text Box 2.1. 17 Our field has a long history of important programmatic works and a living body of contemporary theoretical writings, and none of this is to suggest that ethnomusicologists should stop themselves from writing works that are primarily intended for an audience of other ethnomusicologists. (Indeed, we imagine that one of the main audiences of this book will be other ethnomusicologists.) However, as we have argued above, academic disciplines do not divide the world into distinct phenomena, with each claiming sole rights to a unique object of study. Cast in their widest terms, many of the topics that ethnomusicologists address and the theoretical questions we seek to answer are part and parcel of a much wider domain. In writing this book, we have conceptualized our subject matter as both these broader sets of theoretical dialogs and the theoretical work from within disciplinary ethnomusicology, as well as the complex interrelations between them.

Works Cited Bartleet, Brydie-Leigh, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. 2009. Music Autoethnographies: Making Autoethnography Sing/Making Music Personal. Bowen Hills: Australia Academic Press. Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley. 2008. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2016. Music Commodities, Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise. New York: Routledge. Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1995. Women’s Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

22  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone ———. 2004. “Theory as Practice: Some Dialectics of Generality and Specificity in Folklore Scholarship.” In Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture, 43–88. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2010. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2015. “Phenomenological Approaches in the History of Ethnomusicology.” Oxford Handbooks Online. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.001.0001/oxfordhb9780199935321-e-30. Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical Is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press. Bohman, James. (2005) 2016. “Critical Theory.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2016 ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/critical-theory/. Bohlman, Philip V., ed. 2013. The Cambridge History of World Music. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burawoy, Michael. 2003. “Revisits: Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Theory.” American Sociological Review 68 (5): 645–79. Campbell, Patricia Shehan, and Trevor Wiggins, eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Musical Cultures. New York: Oxford University Press. Carr, James Revell. 2014. Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Castro, R. M. V. 2016. “Performance and Autoethnography in Historical Ethnomusicology: Differentiating the Viola and the Violão.” Per Musi 34: 35–61. Cheng, William. 2014. Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Clayton, Martin, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante, eds. 2013. Experience and Meaning in Music Performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Conquergood, Dwight. 2002. “Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research.” TDR: The Drama Review 46 (2): 145–56. Cornelis, Olmo, Joren Six, Andre Holzapfel, and Marc Leman. 2013 “Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music.” Journal of New Music Research 42 (2): 131–49. ­ eadows, Cowdery, James R., Dane L. Harwood, James Kippen, Michele Kisliuk, David Locke, Eddie S. M Leonard B. Meyer, Ingrid Monson, John Shepherd, Christopher Small, and Christopher A. Waterman. 1995. Responses. Ethnomusicology 39 (1): 73–96. Danielson, Virginia. 1997. The Voice of Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daughtry, J. Martin. 2015. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Susan G. 2010. “Ben Botkin’s FBI File.” Journal of American Folklore 122 (487): 3–30. Denzin, Norman. 2003. Performance Ethnography: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dundes, Alan. 2005. “Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of American Folklore 118 (470): 385–408. Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda Shaw. 2011. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. 2nd ed. C ­ hicago: University of Chicago Press. Fales, Cornelia. 2002. “The Paradox of Timbre.” Ethnomusicology 46 (1): 56–95. Friedson, Steven M. 2009. Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frisbie, Charlotte J., and David P. McAllester, eds. 1978. Navajo Blessingway Singer: The Autobiography of Frank Mitchell, 1881–1967. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Fromm, Erich. (1961) 2003. Marx’s Concept of Man. New York: Continuum. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Georges, Robert A., and Michael O. Jones. 1980. People Studying People: The Human Element in Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press. Garcia, Luis-Manuel. 2015. “Beats, Flesh, and Grain: Sonic Tactility and Affect in Electronic Dance Music.” Sound Studies 1 (1): 59–76.

Introduction  23 Giannattasio, Francesco, and Giovanni Giuriati. 2017. Perspectives on a 21st Century Comparative Musicology: Ethnomusicology or Transcultural Musicology? Udine: Nota. Gill, Denise. 2017. Melancholic Modalities: Affect, Islam, and Turkish Classical Musicians. New York: Oxford University Press. Guilbault, Jocelyne, with Gage Averill, Édouard Benoit, and Gregory Rabess. 1993. Zouk: World Music in the West Indies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guilbault, Jocelyne, and Roy Cape. 2014. Roy Cape: A Life on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. “Discipline and Practice: ‘The Field’ as Site, Method, and Location in Anthropology.” In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 1–46. Berkeley: University of California Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press. Hahn, Hans Peter. 2010. “Urban Life-Worlds in Motion: In Africa and Beyond.” Africa Spectrum 45 (3): 115–29. Helbig, Adriana N. 2014. Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hofman, Ana. 2015. “The Affective Turn in Ethnomusicology” Muzikologija 18: 35–55. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. (1944) 2007. The Dialectics of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Johansson, Mats. 2017. “Non-Isochronous Musical Meters: Towards a Multidimensional Model.” Ethnomusicology 61 (1): 31–51. Kaplan, Abraham. 1964. The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company. Keil, Charles. 1979. Tiv Song. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report.” Ethnomusicology 39 (1): 1–19. Keil, Charles, and Steven Feld. 1994. Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keil, Charles, Angeliki V. Keil, and Dick Blau. 1992. Polka Happiness. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Koen, Benjamin D., Jacqueline Lloyd, Gregory Barz, and Karen Brummel-Smith, eds. 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press. Koskoff, Ellen. 2014. A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Livingston, Tamara E. 1999. “Music Revivals: Towards a General Theory.” Ethnomusicology 43 (1): 66–85. Lofland, John, David A. Snow, Leon Anderson, and Lyn H. Lofland. 2005. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Lohman, Laura. 2010. Umm Kulthūm: Artistic Agency and the Shaping of an Arab Legend, 1967–2007. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mahon, Maureen. 2004. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1925) 1948. “Magic, Science, and Religion.” In “Magic, Science, and Religion” and Other Essays, 17–87. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday. Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1996. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcuse, Herbert. (1964) 1991. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. New York: Routledge. Marsh, Kathryn. 2008. The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games. New York: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl. (1888) 1969. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Translated by W. Lough. Marxist Internet Archive. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. McCollum, Jonathan, and David G. Herbert. 2014. Theory and Method in Historical Ethnomusicology. ­Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

24  Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone McGraw, Andy with Christine Kohnen. 2016. “The Byar: An Ethnographic and Empirical Study of a Balinese Musical Moment.” Analytics Approaches to World Music 5 (1): 1–35. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1969. “Ethnomusicology Revisited.” Ethnomusicology 13 (2): 213–29. Miller, Kiri. 2012. Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Clifford R. 2014. Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1979. “Paradigms in the History of Ethnomusicology.” College Music Symposium 19 (1): 67–77. ———. (1983) 2015. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2010. Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nettl, Bruno, and Philip V. Bohlman, 1991. Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pettan, Svanibor, and Jeff Todd Titon, eds. 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1933. The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rahaim, Matthew. 2012. Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Rapport, Evan. 2014. Greeted with Smiles: Bukharian Jewish Music and Musicians in New York. New York: Oxford University Press. Reed-Danahay, Deborah E., ed. 1997. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg. Rice, Timothy. (1987) 2017. “Toward the Remodeling of Ethnomusicology.” In Modeling Ethnomusicology, 43–62. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1994. May It Fill your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. Modeling Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press. Ruskin, Jesse D., and Timothy Rice. 2012. “The Individual in Musical Ethnography.” Ethnomusicology 56 (2): 299–327. Savage, Patrick E., and Steven Brown. 2013. “Toward a New Comparative Musicology.” Analytical Approaches to World Music 2 (2): 148–97. Schütz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. Structures of the Life-World. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Vol. 1. 2 vols. Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press. Seastrom, Lucas. 2015. “Mythic Discovery: Revisiting the Meeting between George Lucas and Joseph Campbell.” StarWars.Com. October 22, 2015. http://www.starwars.com/news/mythic-discoverywithin-the-inner-reaches-of-outer-space-joseph-campbell-meets-george-lucas-part-i. Seeger, Charles. 1977. Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shaw, George Bernard. (1906) 2011. The Doctor’s Dilemma. NP: The Floating Press. Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 1990a. Ethnomusicology: History, Definitions, and Scope. The Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology, vol. 1. New York: Garland Publishing. ———. 1990b. A Century of Ethnomusicological Thought. The Garland Library of Readings in Ethnomusicology, vol. 7. New York: Garland Publishing. ———. 1998. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Slobin, Mark. (1993) 2000. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. 2nd ed. Music/Cultures Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Solomon, Thomas. 2009. “Berlin–Frankfurt–Istanbul: Turkish Hip-Hop in Motion.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (3): 305–27. Spiller, Henry. 2010. Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Introduction  25 Spradley, James P. 1979. The Ethnographic Interview. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. ———. 1980. Participant Observation. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Stone, Ruth M. (1982) 2010. Let the Inside Be Sweet: The Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of Liberia. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stone, Ruth M., and Verlon L. Stone. 1981. “Event, Feedback, and Analysis: Research Media in the Study of Music Events.” Ethnomusicology 25 (2): 215–25. Stone-MacDonald, Angela, and Ruth M. Stone. 2013. “The Feedback Interview and Video Recording in African Research Settings.” Africa Today 59 (4): 2–22. Tenzer, Michael, and John Roeder, ed. 2011. Analytic and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vander, Judith. 1988. Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ­ hicago Van Maanen, John. 2010. Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of C Press. Vila, Pablo. 2000. Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wade, Bonnie C. 2014. Composing Japanese Musical Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Waterman, Richard A. (1956) 1990. “Music in Australian Aboriginal Culture: Some Sociological and Psychological Implications.” In A Century of Ethnomusicological Thought, edited by Kay Kaufman Shelemay, 132–41. New York: Garland. Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge. ———. 2006. “Ethnomusicology and Difference.” Ethnomusicology 50 (2): 259–79. ———. 2017. “Sound, Silence, Music: Power.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 347–53. Wright, Erik Olin, and Mike Beggs. 2015. “Why Class Matters: An Interview with Erik Olin Wright.” Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/socialism-marxism-democracy-inequality-erik-olinwright/. Ziegler, Susanne. 2010. “Historical Sources in the History of Ethnomusicology – A Critical Review.” In Historical Sources and Source Criticism, edited by Susanne Ziegler, 15–30. Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv. Ziegler, Susanne, Ingrid Åkesson, Gerda Lechleitner, and Susana Sardo. 2017. Historical Sources of Ethnomusicology in Contemporary Debate. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

1 Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches to Ethnomusicology From Abstract Structure to Situated Practice Jayson Beaster-Jones One of the first issues that I and other ethnomusicologists confront in the classroom is the persistent fallacy that music is a “universal language,” the meanings of which transcend the particularities of musical systems, cultural contexts, and processes of social and historical change. This idea misunderstands language as much as it misunderstands music, and despite its implied assertion of the social value of music as a way to unify humankind, misunderstands the meanings generated by both forms of expression. Part of the problem here is the tendency to think about music as a thing, rather than as a process (see Attali 1985; Small 1998; Turino 2008; Rahaim, this volume), which is tied to larger questions about how ideologies influence the way that listeners experience sound as music or noise. Few ethnomusicologists today would agree that “music is universal language,” but despite the misunderstandings that this idea entails, it raises a number of useful questions. What do we mean when we say that music “means” or “communicates” an idea? How does music mean or communicate? What kinds of relationships exist among music, language, and other forms of communication?1 Exploring these topics, ethnomusicologists have pursued linguistic analogies for music, as these analogies provide insights into the ways that musicians, listeners, and scholars have thought about music as a mode or system of communication. This chapter will begin by describing some of the key theoretical debates in the field of linguistics, including the notion of the linguistic sign, the role of structure in language, the idea of linguistic competence, and larger issues of language and meaning. I will not endeavor to summarize the entire field of linguistics in this chapter; instead, I will focus upon linguistic theories that have had particular relevance for ethnomusicology and allied disciplines. I suggest that over the course of the twentieth century, many humanistically oriented linguists have shifted away from thinking about language as an abstract, decontextualized cognitive system to emphasize language-in-use as a form of situated, and situating, interaction. Ethnomusicologists interested in music communication have, I argue, followed a similar trajectory by moving away from decontextualized analyses of musical structure to approaches that examine the situated meanings and values of music in performance contexts. Exploring this history, the chapter discusses some of the adaptations of linguistic theory in ethnomusicology and applies ideas from this work to the musical and social analysis of the Hindi language song “Pal pal hai bhaari,” from the 2003 Bollywood film Swades.

The Field of Linguistic Theory Published three years after his death, the Course on General Linguistics by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is the most significant contribution to the field of structural linguistics in the twentieth century ([1916] 1998). Based on class notes taken by his students, the Course made observations about the structure and operation of language that were adopted and developed by generations of linguists and influenced the thinking of

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  27

scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Central to Saussure’s work is the distinction between language (langue) and speech (parole). He used the first term to refer to the system of a language as a whole, while he used the second term to refer to the particular utterances, manifestations, or performances that are outcomes of that system. For Saussure, language is the product of a community (rather than an isolated individual), relatively stable within a given historical moment, and governed by a system of rules that determine correct performance in speech. The consequences of the language/speech distinction are profound: because language is a system produced by a community and distinct from any given performance, one cannot observe language directly. Instead, one must observe performances of language in order to map the system that underlies it, a process akin to using individual pings of sonar to map an ocean floor as a way to predict the trajectories of ocean currents. More than just conceptualizing language as a system, Saussure created the field of ­semiology, the study of sign systems in social life.2 He argued that languages and other systems of communication are built on, around, and through signs. A combination of cognitive and physiological phenomena, Saussurian signs emerge from mental representations that occur in relationship to things (objects, ideas, and so forth) that exist in the world. Sign are composed of two parts: the “signifier,” which is a group of sounds or images (e.g. the sound of the word “tree” or the letters t-r-e-e) and the “signified,” which is an object in the world (e.g. trees themselves). In language, Saussure argued, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, by which he meant that there is no necessary or inherent connection between, say, a tree in one’s field of view and the French word arbre as it is written or spoken. Low-level signifiers have an arbitrary relationship to their signifieds, but at higher levels of linguistic structure, signifiers become less arbitrary; for example, the individual components of a compound word like landscape (“land” and “scape”) may be arbitrary, but the compound word itself clearly is not. Additionally, Saussure notes that it is not just the signifiers that vary from one language to the next but the signifieds as well. For example, the Sanskrit sign sa ṅgīt and the English sign music have different signifiers (the word sa ṅgīt and the word music). In addition, the signifieds of those two signs also differ, as the sign sa ṅgīt includes phenomena that in English would be captured by the concepts of both music and dance. Another central feature of Saussure’s semiology is the distinction between sign meanings and sign values. A sign’s meaning is defined by the connection between a signified and an idea existing independent of language as a self-contained conceptual unit. A sign’s value, however, is defined strictly through its contrasts with the other signs in the system. For example, the meaning of the sign “tree” might be positively defined by listing its attributes (a large plant with roots, a trunk, leaves, etc.); however, its value is defined negatively and in opposition to other signs in the sign system (cf. “bush,” “shrub,” “vine,” etc.). This notion of linguistic value is critical to Saussure’s larger view that linguistic analysis should focus on structure rather than content, a perspective that he applied to other aspects of language, like speech sounds and grammar. On the surface, this distinction between meaning and value might not seem important, yet it and Saussure’s broader emphasis on systemic contrasts in language gave his approach the power to explain large-scale linguistic transformations within language communities. By attending to the way that signs necessarily exist in relationship to other signs and have their values determined through these relationships, large shifts in a language’s phonemics (its system of speech sounds), morphology and syntax (the structure of words and sentences in a language), or semantics (word meanings) can be explained in elegant theoretical terms, with even minor changes creating effects that ripple across the system as a whole. These large-scale shifts are difficult to explain if language and its meanings are understood only through its positive attributes. Identifying the systemic property of language was central to Saussure’s project of transforming linguistics into a science, which was eminently desirable for scholars of his generation.

28  Jayson Beaster-Jones

Finally, Saussure notes that language involves both an abstract set of relationships and a system of classification. That is, in addition to containing the rules that make speech coherent and meaningful, language serves as a means for classifying the world. For instance, Saussure notes that English speakers see a relationship among the terms river, stream, and creek, which are all categories of moving water based upon their relative size; in contrast, the French language parcels the space of moving water into different terms, where flueve and rivière are differentiated both on their relative size and whether they flow into an ocean. This insight, combined with the notion that humans utilize many different kinds of signs and sign systems (of which, Saussure argues, language is predominant), led scholars in a variety of disciplines to explore the inter-relations among sign systems. Applying these ideas about structure and classification to the study of literature, kinship, food, and a wide range of other topics, scholars in an array of academic disciplines expanded structural linguistics into the broad intellectual movement of structuralism, which I will examine in further detail below. In addition, many analysts have attempted to apply Saussure’s ideas about the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified to music, with greater or lesser success. Like language, music seems to operate through abstract, structural relationships among musical sounds. Accordingly, Saussure’s idea of the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified was particularly influential in ethnomusicology. In the mid-twentieth century, the most important linguist to develop the Saussurian conception of structural linguistics was Noam Chomsky (b. 1928). Like Saussure, Chomsky is fundamentally interested in pursuing a scientific study of language, as well as exploring the relationship between language and the mind. Starting with the observation that every human cultural group uses language, Chomsky proposed the notion of a “universal ­g rammar”—an innate, biologically based capacity among humans for language, one that emerges from their largely unconscious use of language structures to produce correct sentences. Despite their apparent differences, Chomsky argued that all human languages are based on a shared “deep structure,” an underlying pattern of organization that is built into the human mind. The rules of each individual language are a product of this deep structure. Particular utterances have a “surface structure,” which emerges from the underlying rules of the language in question, which, in turn, depend upon the deep structure of language in general (Chomsky 1965). While the universal human capacity for language acquisition is not an especially controversial idea these days, the relationship between these structuring principles and linguistic meaning is subject to extensive debate (e.g. Lakoff 1971, 1987), and Chomsky has adapted his theory several times to account for new developments in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science (e.g. Chomsky and Lasnik 1977; Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995). Another Chomskian idea that has been adopted by some ethnomusicologists is the notion of “generative grammar,” which offers a very specific vision of the way a system of language rules produces sentences. Observing that humans can create an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of grammatical rules, Chomsky argued that language rules must be recursive, with one set of rules nesting within other sets to produce the complex sentences found in everyday speech. To take a very simplified example, one could imagine an English grammatical rule that states that sentences may have a subject, a verb, and an object (e.g. Chris likes music); in this context, a second-order rule might state that one could recursively replace the sentence’s object with another subject, verb, and object (e.g. Chris likes it when Jan makes music). These notions of generative grammar and recursive rules became useful for the analysis of creativity and creative play within the operation of systems like language and music (e.g. Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1985), though they do not account for the aesthetic or poetic dimensions of language described by linguists like Roman Jakobson, who I discuss below. Finally, Chomsky refined Saussure’s ideas of langue and parole by drawing a distinction between “linguistic competence” (a speaker-hearer’s knowledge of a

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  29

language) and “linguistic performance” (the use of language in a particular context) (1965: 4). By accounting for the relative level of the speaker’s or listener’s ability to comprehend and perform language when its structure and meanings remain consistent, this distinction helps to explain how miscommunication occurs in everyday language use. The work of structural linguists like Saussure and Chomsky was one of the main inspirations for structuralism, an intellectual movement that shaped a wide range of scholarly disciplines in the twentieth century. Like earlier theorists who argued for an underlying rationality of human cultural experience, the structuralists were concerned with understanding the cognitive systems that they believed had language-like properties and produced the cultural forms (e.g. myth, music, food, or kinship systems) of each individual society. Because systemic properties were common to the cognitive systems that produced a society’s bodies of myth or music, the analyst, it was believed, could compare seemingly disparate phenomena from within a society and uncover the properties and organizational principles that they shared. By this logic, situated social contexts of use were unimportant because it was the underlying structural mechanisms that were primarily responsible for generating performances. By aggregating together many performances of key cultural texts, analysts sought to reveal the underlying structural-organizational principles that produced them. These principles, they argued, could ultimately be reduced to sets of binary oppositions through which all forms of cultural expression might be coded and compared. Mapping out these structures of binaries enabled direct comparisons between systems, which, the structuralists supposed, would enable researchers to expose cultural universals in ways that would be relevant to scientific enquiry. The foremost proponent of this approach was the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who developed structuralism into a broad-based theoretical orientation that spoke to fundamental questions in the humanities and social sciences (e.g. [1949] 1969, 1955, [1962] 1963, [1962] 1966, [1964] 1969). Drawing on structuralism, among other approaches, ethnomusicologists like John Blacking (1974) and Steven Feld ([1982] 2012) compared the structure of the music or myths that they found in their fieldsites with the social structures of the societies that they studied; in so doing, they hoped to unveil the otherwise hidden logics of culture, as well as gain insight into the operation of the human mind.3 The insights of structural linguistics and the subsequent growth of the structuralist movement had a strong influence on ethnographic work from the 1950s to the 1980s. Within anthropology, for example, the interest in language and social categories spawned the areas of cognitive anthropology and ethnoscience. Building on Saussure’s ideas about classification, anthropologists in these traditions studied cultural and linguistic taxonomies (hierarchically organized systems of categories) to understand how language influences the way the people from a particular cultural group understand and represent the world (e.g. Berlin and Kay 1969; Conklin 1973; Tambiah 1976; and Lakoff 1987; see also Whorf 1964).4 Focusing on abstract ordering principles, these scholars argued that while individual cultural groups differ greatly in the way that they classify phenomena like kinship, flora and fauna, or color, the underlying principle of organization by taxonomy is universal. Taking the notion of language categories in a somewhat different direction, other scholars deployed the idea of “speech genres” developed by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) to understand how the categories of language use within a linguistic community (e.g. a tweet, a note, a memorandum, a manifesto, a treatise) shape the structure and meaning of discourse within that community (see Bakhtin [1979] 1987; Silverstein and Urban 1996; and Lee 1997; on Bakhtinian approaches to voice, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume). In the 1970s, structural linguistics and the approaches to anthropological work that it informed came under strong and sustained critique. For example, Saussure treated language as a synchronic system (a set of rules operating uniformly at a single historical moment), because he believed that if linguistics was to be a science, it needed to begin by revealing the structural processes at the center of human communication and work outward from there. This is not to

30  Jayson Beaster-Jones

say that he deemed diachronic analysis (the study of language change over time) and s­ituated activities of speaking as unimportant; rather, he expected that the study of those topics would follow from the systematic study of synchronic language structure. Saussure’s 1970s critics argued that the focus on synchronic systems elides much of what is important in language, ­including the way that linguistic performance unfolds over time, the production and reception of affect, and the varied ways that people from differing social roles may experience an interaction, as well as broader issues of embodiment in language (Turner 1977; Silverstein 1979). A second group of scholars criticized the structural linguist’s assumption that languages and linguistic communities could be treated as if they were internally homogeneous and sharply separated from their neighbors. These scholars argued that taking such a view prevents the linguist from accounting for the ways that languages inflect each other through, for example, loan words, pidgins, or creoles (Irvine and Gal 2000). Sharpening the political critique, scholars working in an area called the politics of representation accused structural linguistics of privileging the views of Western analysts over local perspectives and producing colonialist ethnographies filled with structures, rather than people (Marcus and Fischer 1986).5 Thus, the ideological debates, conflicts, and contradictions within a linguistic community tended to be excluded from the analyses of structural linguistics or were relegated to footnotes. In this context, the elegant systems that these scholars used to describe languages were often incomprehensible to the interlocutors who provided the very data upon which those systems were based. Finally, one might add that structural linguistics tended to overlook other important components of verbal interaction, such as prosody (the rhythm and pitch of speaking) and paralanguage (gestures and other embodied performances that accompany talk), features that are similar to music but are not easily described in structural terms.

Text Box 1.1  Embodiment and Practice across the Disciplines The theme of embodiment is central to a wide range of currents in contemporary social thought. To say that a phenomenon like mind, text, or social life is embodied is to say that it necessarily depends on our existence as corporeal beings and the particularities of our physical bodies. In modern philosophy, the interest in embodiment was a reaction against the dualistic ontology of René Descartes (1596–1650), which understood mind and body as completely separate orders of reality ([1641] 1990). From Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962) to Michel Foucault’s writings on the body and power ([1975] 1979), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work at the meeting place of cognitive science and philosophy (1999), and beyond, a wide range of thinkers have emphasized the embodied nature of social phenomena. (For a useful collection of readings on approaches to embodiment in the tradition of Continental European philosophy, see Welton 1999.) In this volume, Sugarman’s chapter on gender and sexuality, Waterman’s chapter on performance and improvisation, Meizel and Daughtry’s chapter on sound and voice, my chapter on phenomenology, and Rahaim’s chapter on participation discuss the varied approaches to embodiment that contemporary scholars have taken. The theme of embodiment is closely related to that of social practice, and the increasing interest in situated conduct that Beaster-Jones discusses here is closely related to trends recounted in the chapters by Sugarman, Waterman, Meizel and Daughtry, myself, and Rahaim. See also the discussion of practice theory in Text Box 2.1. —Harris M. Berger

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  31

Situated Language-in-Use In the context of these critiques, scholars in the 1960s from the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology began to pay much more attention to language use and linguistic performance. Distinct from the syntactic and semantic approaches to language, these pragmatic approaches to linguistic analysis move past language structure in order to examine the ways in which language-in-use is necessarily situated within—and potentially transformative of—its social and historical contexts.6 One of the most important scholars to develop these approaches was Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), who inspired researchers to examine speech events and the way language is used in social interaction. Jakobson argued that there are six language factors present in any given speech event, each of which has a corresponding language function. He described the factors in this way: The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to [that is] graspable by the addressee, and [is] either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee… and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication. ([1976] 1990: 73, emphasis in original) Several fundamental insights emerge from this perspective, not the least of which are that the meanings of speech cannot be isolated from its performance contexts and that the analysis of speech events must take into account the physical, material, and psychological connections between speaker and hearer. From these factors, Jakobson derives six communicative functions. Acknowledging at the outset that speech acts almost always involve more than one function at a time, he suggests that in any performance of language, a functional hierarchy is in operation, whereby one function predominates but the other five continue to play a part.7 Unlike structural linguists, Jakobson took a keen interest in verbal art and argued for interdisciplinary collaborations between linguists and literary scholars. Expanding the intellectual tools of linguistics to account for language’s poetic function, Jakobson explored the aesthetics of everyday speech and showed how or why certain word combinations might sound better than others (e.g. why the rhythm produced by the word order of my last name, “Jayson Beaster-Jones,” made it preferable to the alternative word order, “Jayson Jones-Beaster”). (See Table 1.1.) Following Jakobson’s ideas about the functions of language-in-use, the pioneering linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes (1927–2009) reoriented Chomsky’s ideas of linguistic competence, Table 1.1  Jakobson’s Model of Language Functions Function

Orientation

Purpose

Referential

Context

Emotive

Addresser

Conative Phatic

Addressee Contact

Metalinguistic

Code

Poetic

Message

Communicate information, express denotative (direct) meanings Express the affective relationship of the speaker to their message Influence the thoughts or behavior of the addressee Establish, prolong, discontinue communication; check that the channel is intact Communicate about the operation of language itself, clarify language with language Perform the aesthetic dimension of a speech event or verbal art in ways that are sequential and unfold over time

32  Jayson Beaster-Jones

urging scholars to go beyond the study of syntax and semantics, and attend to “communicative competence,” the cultural knowledge that speakers have about performance of appropriate linguistic utterances in context (1972). This incorporation of the pragmatic function of language into linguistic analysis has had a major impact on anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Richard Bauman (1984), for example, expanded Hymes’s framework into an influential conception of linguistic performance that includes not just the transmission of referential content, but also the manner in which performances take place, the ethical responsibilities of the performer to the audience, and the aesthetic and evaluative dimensions of performance.8 Closely linked with this work is the theory of “framing” developed by anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) and the related notion of “keying” found in the work of sociologist Erving ­Goffman (1922–1983). These theories show how utterances can carry vastly different meanings depending upon how they are used within different contexts of social interaction (Bateson [1955] 1972; Goffman 1979). For example, the utterance “I love you” might be understood by an interlocutor in any number of ways, depending upon how the speaker places it in context (e.g. as an insult, a joke, a bon mot, as reference to an earlier interaction, or the words of a fictional character in a play). Like Hymes, the approaches of Bateson and Goffman have been highly influential, helping linguistic anthropologists and other language scholars reveal how meaning is shaped by and situated within larger social contexts.9 Taking this notion of language performance in a different direction, the British philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–1960) proposed a theory of “speech acts,” which describes the ways that utterances have meanings and consequences beyond the operation of language as a system (1962). At the heart of Austin’s work is the distinction between “constative” and “performative” utterances: constatives describe a state of affairs and have a truth value, accurately or inaccurately representing a situation in the world. In contrast, performatives create or change a state of affairs in the world. For example, the performative utterance “You are under arrest” does not merely describe one’s status in the legal system; rather, the utterance establishes that status. If the person stating “you are under arrest” is a police officer (and if other conditions are met), their utterance of those words actually changes the addressee’s legal status. Austin goes on to define three kinds of speech acts: “locutionary acts,” which generate meaning through the regular operation of language to convey information; “illocutionary acts,” which carry along with them a certain force (e.g. as a result of saying “I promise that I will… ,” I am bound to certain actions); and “perlocutionary acts,” which have effects upon the emotions, thoughts, or actions of a receiver (e.g. an appeal such as “I am begging you to come with me to the party”). By revealing the power of language to establish and transform social relationships, Austin’s speech act theory has had a tremendous impact on the humanities and social sciences. Text Box 1.2  Linguistics and Semiotics in the Context of Analytic Philosophy The narrative of diverging intellectual movements that Beaster-Jones describes here (i.e. structural linguistics versus language-in-use perspectives) was part of a broad, transdisciplinary trend in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, the desire for scientific rigor that was so prominent in the work of structural linguistics also animated thinkers in philosophy. Following foundational work by Gottlob Frege (1848– 1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), scholars in philosophy’s analytic tradition developed modern symbolic logic and specialized logical languages with the goals of establishing logic as the foundation for mathematics and answering longstanding questions in philosophy (Frege [1879] 1967, [1884] 1974; Whitehead and Russell [1910–1913] 1962). Ludwig ­Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was central to this tradition. His great early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ([1921] 1922), understood language solely as a means for

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  33

referring to facts in the world and of articulating logical and mathematical truths; elaborating this perspective through seven propositions, the Tractatus sought to resolve the traditional problems of philosophy by purifying language of any element that muddied the referential waters. Scholars in a movement called “logical positivism” sought to carry forward the line of thinking that the Tractatus set out (e.g. Carnap [1928] 1967 and the essays collected in Ayer 1959), but over time, a number of analytic philosophers began to develop ideas that, at least partially, worked against these impulses. Spearheaded by Wittgenstein’s later work ([1953] 2009) and the ideas of J. L. Austin ([1962] 1965), the tradition of ordinary language philosophy shifted attention away from logical foundations and linguistic reference, and sought to understand the way language is employed in quotidian contexts and the place of language in social life. Austin is not the only point of contact between this history and the one that Beaster-Jones traces, as Gregory Bateson’s “Theory of Play and F ­ antasy” ­(Bateson [1955] 1972) is explicitly framed as a response to Whitehead and Russell, the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists. This strain of research ­contributed not only to the development of the language-in-use perspectives that Beaster-Jones describes here, but to the field of performance studies, which is discussed in Ellen ­Waterman’s chapter in this book. It is worth emphasizing that ordinary language philosophy and the language-inuse perspectives that Beaster-Jones discusses did not in any sense erase or supersede the other traditions. While few scholars today would call what they do logical positivism, a great number of philosophers work in the tradition of Frege and Russell, where they seek to solve philosophical problems by analyzing and clarifying language and forward research in symbolic logic. Structural linguistics likewise continues to be an actively going concern. —Harris M. Berger One final language-in-use paradigm that has informed ethnographers of language and music is derived from the work of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Like Saussure, Peirce understood the sign as the medium of human cognition and communication, but in most other respects the two thinkers differ substantially. While Saussure’s semiology offers broad insights into the operation of language systems, Peirce’s semiotic draws attention to the interweaving of language and other modes of communication, and provides an elegant way of theorizing the values of—and interactions among—many kinds of phenomena. The Peircean semiotic gives scholars a sophisticated understanding of human meaning-making practices and has long been used in classical American philosophy, film, and literature studies. However, his work was not widely adopted in linguistic and cultural anthropology until the 1980s, and in ethnomusicology in the 1990s, when it attracted widespread attention as an alternative to Saussurian semiology. While Pierce’s ideas are enormously powerful, parsing his writing is not easy, and to appreciate his work, readers must reconfigure their understanding of many everyday words and concepts. The Peircean semiotic rests upon the notion that humans perceive, experience, remember, and think with and through signs. As a basic unit of analysis, the sign is, in Peirce’s terms, “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” ([1916] 1960: vol. 2, 228). As a medium of thought and expression, signs can emerge from internal sources (e.g. memories, beliefs) or external ones (e.g. sensory stimuli, actions), and because cognition operates through the collaboration of internal and external signs, no sign exists in isolation. Rather, signs necessarily co-occur with other signs. The Peircean sign emerges from the interactions of three parts: an object, a sign vehicle (sometime shortened to “a sign”), and an interpretant.10 An object can be anything in the world, from the abstract color blue, to a corporeal object like a pencil or a saxophone, the snap of a can opener opening a tuna can, the perception of the dialect of someone’s spoken French as having an Algerian accent, the affect signaled by the timbre of

34  Jayson Beaster-Jones Table 1.2  Peirce’s Three Main Sign Types Sign Type

Object-Sign Vehicle Relation

Examples

Icon

Resemblance

Index

Causation, co-occurrence

Symbol

Human convention

Line drawing of a cat, which may be an icon of an actual cat or cats in general The sound of tympani, which may be intended or interpreted as an (auditory) icon of thunder Weather vane indexes wind direction Dropping the /r/ sound in speech may index that the speaker is from New York City $ is a symbol for American currency The Spanish word “el búho” means “owl” in English

a voice, or the corpus of American constitutional law. A sign vehicle is something that represents the object or the qualities of the object in some way, yet is also constrained or determined by the qualities or properties of the object; an interpretant is a consequence or representation of the object-sign relationship, which might include, among other things, an action, behavior, interpretation, or emotion. Peirce’s best-known work describes ten possible sign types, and his later writings delineated sixty-six categories of signs (see Atkin 2010); however, most scholars today work with a subset of three of his sign types (Table 1.2). According to Peirce, these sign types are related to one another through nested hierarchies, such that lower order signs are built into higher order signs: a symbol is composed of indexes, and indexes are composed of icons. This insight helps to explain how complicated signs like a cross might operate at many levels simultaneously (e.g. as a conventional symbol of the body of Christian philosophical thought, as an index of the location of a church in a skyline, as an icon of the wooden device on which Jesus was crucified). ­Linguistic structure might also be explained in Peircean terms as a system based upon the symbolic (i.e. arbitrary and conventional) connection between sound concept and object. While symbols certainly play a role in language, most real-world speech performance operates at the iconic and indexical level, with spoken words and gestures frequently serving as icons or indexes that reference or constitute the speech interaction as it is taking place (Lee 1997). Thus, in verbal interactions, the word choices and tone of voice that a speaker uses may index the nature of the relationship between speaker and hearer (e.g. contrast the way one speaks to one’s child with the deferential approach one might use in speaking to a king or other head of state). Grammatical structures in Romance languages, to use another example, index the gender of the speaker or the perceived gender of the hearer, while word choice or the pronunciation of particular vowels might index the regional or class background of the speaker. Studies of language-in-use draw our attention to the ways that language itself is much more than its semantic meanings or the syntactic structures that are shared by an ideal speaker and an ideal listener, as described by Saussure and Chomsky.11 As the critics of structural linguistics have argued, we miss the point of language performance if we limit our analysis to semantics and syntax: language performance is also the performance of many varieties of sociability. Taken in slightly different terms, one might see semiotic analysis as a framework for understanding the ways individuals perceive and derive meanings in and through language performance as a mode of social life. Such an approach enables an analyst to begin to address the ways in which signs that reside outside of the semantic or syntactic domain (e.g. color, noise, style, timbre) might have manifold significances and interconnections with other signs, without reducing these meanings to structural or linguistic analogs.

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  35

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches to Music Like language, music has long been conceptualized as a mode of communication, and a variety of scholars have used ideas from linguistics and semiotics to understand meaning making in music. Drawing an analogy with the semantic function of language, the composer and music theorist Wilson Coker (1972), for example, attempted to explain meaning in music by developing a musical lexicon that had a stable set of meanings. Seeking analogies with the syntactic function of language, others tried to identify the Chomskian “deep structure” of particular musical styles (e.g. Perlman and Greenblatt 1981; Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1985). Musicologists applied structuralist approaches to examine composition in Western art music (Tarasti 1987; Nattiez 1990; Dougherty 1994; Hatten 1995), while a broad range of scholars have borrowed ideas from Peirce to understand musical processes (Boilés 1982; Tagg 1987, 1993; Monson 1996; Sawyer 1996; Dueck 2013a, 2013b). As in linguistics, ethnomusicology has seen a slow transition across the span of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from approaches that treat music as an abstract cognitive system to approaches that examine music in/as situated practice. While ideas from linguistics and semiotics can be highly valuable in the study of music, they cannot be employed in a direct or uncritical fashion. To develop useful insights, one needs a nuanced perspective that acknowledges both the similarities and differences between music and language, treats them as interrelated but distinct sign systems, and acknowledges the often ineffable qualities of musical experience. Such an approach necessarily requires many levels of analysis. When asked, for example, “At what level can we say that music is meaningful?” one might first point out that by defining any given sound as “music,” one has already ascribed meaning to it, insofar as the categorization of any sonic phenomenon (e.g. the sound produced by a violin, human voices in Qur’anic recitation, or an automobile engine) always requires taking a particular ideological stance about what is or is not music.12 One might also point out that, at any level of analysis, particular kinds of aural phenomena might operate as signs and be imbued with musical meanings. These meanings might emerge, for example, from the perception of harmonies, rhythms, timbres, textures, styles, or ornaments. If one does not take a careful approach to these issues, treating music and language as interrelated systems of human communication can lead to serious conceptual difficulties.13 Until the 1990s, structural linguistic approaches to music analysis were relatively common. In many cultural traditions, there are musical sounds that retain relatively stable meanings and seem to operate in parallel to the semantic function of words; as such, some musical systems appear to have something like the referential function of language and operate as a “speech surrogate” (Stern 1957). George Herzog’s documentation of Liberian drum languages (1934, 1945) is one example of ethnomusicological work that takes this approach. Similarly, scholars in musicology and music theory have analyzed musical motifs and harmonies, such as Wagnerian leitmotifs, as referring to particular kinds of extramusical meanings (Meyer 1960; Hacohen and Wagner 1997). However, this apparent referential function in music differs distinctly from that of language, because language can, through its metalinguistic function, be used to discuss, frame, or refer to other linguistic phenomena (e.g. in reported speech or word definitions) and does so in ways that do not have a direct parallel in musical communication—at least without resorting to language as a mediating communicative system. Another adaptation of the music/language analogy was through the analysis of underlying musical structures as a kind of syntax. One notable example is Robin Cooper’s application of Chomsky’s notions of deep structure and generative grammar to the raga system found in Indian classical musics (1977). In those traditions, the system of ragas allows the musician to generate melodies, in part, by drawing on a set of melodic modes.

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These modes systematically govern the relationships among tones and musical phrases, providing the listener with a way to determine which composition is being performed at any given time (e.g. Rag Bhairavi or Rag Yaman) and whether it is being performed correctly, accurately, and/or appropriately.14 Drawing from Chomsky’s paradigm, Cooper classified particular ragas within the larger system in terms of their modal content. In much the same way that sentences can be correctly generated from an underlying grammatical structure, most raga performances, Cooper argued, can be correctly generated from an underlying modal structure that would be coherent given the rules of that system. Unfortunately, like other kinds of structural analysis, Cooper’s discussion reduced ragas to a species of mode without accounting for the short melodic phrases and extramusical associations (e.g. times of the day, seasons, gods) that ragas also carry along with them. While semantic and syntactic calques of music gained prominence with the rise of structuralism in the 1950s and began to wane with that movement’s decline in the 1980s, the tendency to analyze music as a kind of “text” has a much longer history and continues to play a prominent role in the disciplines of musicology and music theory. Many scholars in these fields treat musical scores in Western staff notion as their primary study object and treat score analysis as their primary methodology. The analysis of musical scores, they claim, reveals the formal organization of individual works or larger bodies of music associated with particular composers, historical periods, or genres. While this way of doing scholarship, which we might loosely refer to as “textualism,” can be a fruitful means of conducting music analysis in the context of certain periods of Western art music, it is subject to many of the same critiques that have been made of structural linguistics and structuralism more generally. A textualist analysis of the verse/chorus form of a song, for example, does not provide many insights into other dimensions of musical meaning, like vocal or instrumental timbre, individual performative interpretations of the text, or the unfolding of music over time, inter alia. Most importantly, textualist work lends few insights into the way that musical sound is received by listeners, the way that music is reproduced within and framed by situated or large-scale social contexts, or the production and reception of affect, which is an important component of musical experiences in many cultures. Finally, the vast majority of the music produced by humans is simply not notated, nor is it readily reduced to notation.15 One important entrée into the relationship between music and language that moves beyond the textualist approach is Steven Feld’s landmark work, Sound and Sentiment. This monograph is important in the history of ethnomusicology for combining the structural analysis of cultural taxonomies with language-in-use approaches and richly evocative, humanistic ethnography. Originally published in 1982 and currently in its third edition (2012), Sound and Sentiment is a study of the music and culture of the Bosavi clan of the Kaluli peoples of Papua New Guinea. Feld conducted much of his fieldwork in conjunction with Edward and Bambi Schieffelin, linguistic anthropologists who worked on Kaluli language and cultural practices over many decades. Tracing out the linkages between local ideas about poetics and the genres of weeping, song, and sacred narrative, Feld draws on structuralist insights to argue that the Kaluli myth “The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird” is the “metaphoric base for Kaluli aesthetics” (2012: 14). The early chapters of the book explore the meanings that birds have in Kaluli cultural practice and provide detailed discussions of Kaluli folk taxonomies of birds and bird songs, the local significance of individual bird species, and the ways that avian soundscapes are tied to indigenous understandings of space and the temporality of daily and seasonal events. Feld shows how Kaluli understand the sounds of particular birds as the voices of deceased ancestors, who in death carry on social lives that are parallel to their former human lives. Drawing all of this together, Feld argues that birds and bird songs are the means by which the Kaluli place themselves within—and make sense of—the world around them. The analysis of music making later in the book centers on the

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call of the muni bird (Beautiful Fruitdove, ptilinopus pulchellus). Feld shows how the sound of the bird’s call is imitated in and provides the melodic structure for an important genre of Kaluli lament. A musically stylized form of weeping, the laments focus on the names and memories of the deceased and are composed with the intent of moving listeners to tears. In Feld’s analysis, bird song is the structuring principle for women’s weeping, weeping is further stylized into song, and the women’s song is, in turn, used to move men to tears. Beyond its structural analysis of myth, Sound and Sentiment has been foundational in illustrating the relationships among affect, sound, and linguistic and musical classification, as well as in showing how those relationships are, as in language, unconsciously performed. It has also been a model for the use of theory in ethnomusicology, as it draws liberally from several different paradigms that are sometimes at odds with each other, including structuralism (Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1966), interpretive anthropology (Geertz 1973), cognitive anthropology (Conklin 1973), and the ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1972; Schieffelin 1976). In addition to being an important work in ethnomusicology, this book has become one of the foundational texts in the fields of sound studies and ecomusicology, as it richly examines human interactions with soundscapes and the representations of those soundscapes in expressive practice (see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume). Another fruitful way that linguistic insights have been applied to music is by analyzing how musical categories organize the expectations and experiences of audiences and performers. In other work, Feld (1984) addressed this topic as part of a larger consideration of “speech about music,” a term he adapted from Charles Seeger (1977). Feld described speech about music as a kind of metacommunication that frames the meanings experienced by musicians and listeners. Feld’s ideas on this topic have been usefully applied in a wide variety of situations. For example, my own work on music industries in India (Beaster-Jones 2016) shows how genre is a fundamental organizing principle for many kinds of musical practices. From the earliest stages of production, music producers use the idea of genre to anticipate the tastes of potential audiences and guide the work of musicians and engineers (Frith 1996; Negus 1999)—even as the audiences themselves are constituted through their encounters with these genres (Warner 2005). Like other cultural and linguistic categories, genres have a certain contingency; the artists or recordings that are exemplars of a genre are always shifting, and the boundaries among genres change as well. For example, the genre category “jazz” has had many different sets of cultural associations across its history. It is unlikely that the critics and listening publics of the 1920s could have anticipated the cultural transformation of this genre from a popular dance style in their era (one that was the subject of an intense moral panic) to a highly intellectual art music in the bebop period of the 1940s and 1950s. Extending Saussure’s insights about the systematic nature of sign values, one might observe that genres are defined both by their positive features and in opposition to other genres. As a result, historical change in the meaning of one genre will inflect the meanings of other genres, even if their musical content remains the same. Thus, the 1990s saw the rising prominence in mainstream discourse of a narrative that treated jazz as “America’s classical music,” and this occurred at a moment when hip-hop had become one of the most influential forms of popular music. It is no accident that, at the same time, hip-hop was the subject of the same kind of moral panic about the perceived negative influence of black music on American society that had been directed at jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. In this context, the condemnation of hip-hop can be seen, at least in part, as a systematic effect, the result of the increase in jazz’s cultural status. In addition to guiding the way that musical sound is associated with social groups, genre also frames expectations about the behavior, dress, and styles of interaction among listeners and performers within a music scene or culture. Operating as overt or covert social categories, genre conventions come into play as talk about music—and as music itself—are

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performed in ways deemed “appropriate” for their social contexts. (For example, compare the audience practices of a Sufi qawwali with those of an Irish traditional music session.) As a result, genre discourses connect music and identity, such that the perceived affective qualities and social characteristics of participants in a music culture can be indexed through the performance and consumption of certain types of music.16 Genre labels can indicate forms of musical production or performance (Turino 2000), attitudes or behaviors (Hebdige 1979; Walser 1993), and modes of talk in and through music (Feld and Fox 1994; Berger and ­Carroll 2003). In this way, music may express the values, aspirations, or identities of ­particular communities, and, at least on the surface, may serve as a guide for conceptions of authenticity (Stokes 1997; Taylor 1997; Frith 2000; Toynbee 2000; Beaster-Jones 2009, 2011). Insofar as individual perspectives on genres vary, the relative meanings of genre may vary across differing social, cultural, or geographic contexts. As the music associated with a local soundscape, the meaning of a musical genre might be widely shared within a community and therefore taken for granted, or it may be historicized and treated as a cultural tradition, especially as generations of musicians and listeners become enculturated into its musical practice. Conversely, new or unfamiliar musics have to be put in their place—­ socially, culturally, geographically—to be made meaningful. For example, Charles Carson (2004) describes how musical styles are territorialized as cultural icons in the background music of Walt Disney World’s EPCOT Center: mariachi music is a key part of the placemaking in the Mexican Pavilion, while Bavarian music is central to the German Pavilion. These representations, Carson argues, provide one stable point of connecting the peoples of the world to the musics that these peoples ostensibly produce. Similarly, one of the important roles of film music is to subtly establish when and where particular scenes take place, as well as provide additional information about particular characters (Kalinak 1992). In short, musical practices both constitute and are constituted through language, and speech about music becomes one important way that these practices are made meaningful, albeit in ways that are not necessarily universal. (On the role of genre in the globalization of music, see Wallach and Clinton, this volume.) Semiotic Approaches to Music Analysis Applying ideas from structural linguistics to music can help clarify the systemic dimensions of musical cognition and performance, but they provide little insight into the interconnection of music and other sign systems. Such an approach cannot explain, for example, how social or cultural groups use music as a way of establishing and reproducing various kinds of identities (e.g. ethnic, gender, regional, religious), much less the affective and social relationships that people develop through musical practice. In order to address music as a mode of social life, a number of scholars have turned to the Peircean semiotic as a model for music analysis. Notable among them are Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1975, 1990), Charles Boilés (1982), and Thomas Turino (1999, 2008). In differing ways, each of these theorists illustrate how musical sound can generate extramusical meanings, interact with other kinds of signs, and play into the full range of an individual’s experiences. For many musicologists, the most influential approach to musical semiotics has been Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s Music and Discourse (1990). Drawing from the extensive body of semiotic theory developed by Peirce (1960), Jean Molino (1975, 1978), and Umberto Eco (1976, 1984), as well as his own earlier investigations (1975), Nattiez adapted Peirce’s notion of the interpretant into an idiosyncratic theoretical apparatus that is highly suggestive, although it can at times be confusing. For instance, his paradigm deviates from Peirce’s terminological specificity, particularly in his inconsistent distinction between the terms “sign” and “symbol.” Nattiez suggests that we might analyze music in various performative modes as

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dense constellations of signs, which he calls the “symbolic form” (8). Nattiez then extends Molino’s “tripartition” model to understand the process of meaning making in music. As a model for examining musical symbols, tripartition involves the analysis of the “poietic” (everything involved in the creation of music), the “esthetic” (all of the possible ways musical sound might be received or interpreted by anyone over time), and the “neutral” or “trace” (the work or musical expression itself ). Following this approach, one might study a song like George Gershwin’s “Summertime” by starting with a poietic analysis of the various versions of the piece that have emerged over time and showing how they bear the musical values of the eras in which they were performed. Focusing on the aesthetic level, one would examine the reception of the various versions of the composition and how its meanings are constituted and transformed by individuals or groups. Focusing on the level of the trace, one would analyze the material embodiment of the song—how it is reproduced in performance and in musical scores, and how these embodiments come to inflect the poietic and aesthetic levels. Tripartition, Nattiez argues, thus provides a way to examine the entirety of musical meaning from every potential perspective and explain the broader semiotic properties of music. Like other European musicologists, Nattiez largely focuses his attention on Western art music, although he does provide some examples from ethnomusicological studies of other musical traditions. In a well-known 1982 article, Charles Boilés adopts much of the theoretical perspective that Nattiez had developed in his early work (1975), although he moves Nattiez’s apparatus even further beyond the analysis of Western art music, while also pointing to the problems with the musicological and textualist approaches to musical semiotics discussed above. Boilés’s essay critiques, among other things, the analysis of musical sound as a kind of syntax removed from its historical and cultural contexts, as well as the presumption that one might treat a musical work as a unitary set of signs without accounting for the subject positions of its listeners. This latter point is expanded into a useful set of semiotic tools for unpacking the various interpretations of a musical event. Thomas Turino (1999, 2008) has developed one of the most important semiotic approaches to ethnomusicology by working directly from Peirce, rather than from Peirce’s interpreters in musicology, as others have. Deploying the Peircean semiotic to explain why music has an affective power that is so often difficult to describe through language, Turino (1999) argues that iconicity and indexicality are critical for understanding the connections between music and group identities, shared experiences, and social memories. Like Nattiez, Turino illustrates how signs never operate in isolation from other signs but are necessarily interconnected with each other through a process that he calls “semiotic chaining” ­(222–24). Following from this insight, he compellingly argues that the lower order signs in music like icons and indexes have greater affective potential than the higher order symbols, which, by their nature, tend to operate on the cognitive rather than affective level. Turino suggests that, for most people, music largely operates through icons and indexes, rising to symbolic signs only for specialists. It is because signs associated with memory and affect dominate music, he argues, that music has the kind of evocative power that it does. And through their connection with memory, indexes accrue meanings over time and increase in their density, a phenomenon Turino labels “semantic snowballing” (235), a term which is roughly analogous to Nattiez’s “symbolic form” described above. In his later work, Turino (2008) goes on to apply the Peircean semiotic to an elegant discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and to show how the analysis of iconic and indexical signs can provide scholars with insights into the relationships between music and the rest of social life.17 One of the strengths of semiotic approaches vis-à-vis structural linguistic analogies is that they do not presume that music and musical experiences operate as hermetic systems. In other words, language, gesture, dance, music, and other modes of cultural expression

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generate significances that necessarily emerge through manifold genres of interaction. ­Indeed, the very inseparability of music from the rest of social life makes semiotic analysis, like other language-in-use perspectives, a valuable paradigm for analyzing the contributions of music to dense social and multimedia contexts. It is not difficult to imagine, for example, that listeners versed in music and architecture might see an iconic relationship between sonata form in Western art music and their perception of a particular abstract theme and its development in a building or architectural style. Moreover, because sign vehicles are determined in part by their objects, one can see how interpretations of musical sound derived from interpretations of objects in the world might not be entirely arbitrary, in Saussure’s sense of the term. For example, following Alan Merriam’s discussion of the potential for universal musical symbols (1964, 229–35), one might point out that it would be unlikely for iconic interpretations of the percussive strings, prominent timpani, metrical changes, and dissonant harmonies of the “Ritual Abduction” section of Igor ­Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to center upon peaceful, pastoral images for most listeners, regardless of the musical communities to which they belong. Further, for those who have seen Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia, interpretations of “Ritual Abduction” are likely to be framed, at least in part, by the visual representations of exploding volcanoes and lands rising from the sea that accompany this music in the film. In semiotic terms, a wide range of signs and sign types connect music and image in the film (resemblances, contiguities, associations, etc.), and they do so in ways that are more or less stable for listeners who are familiar with Western art music conventions. One influential monograph that draws extensively from Peircean semiotic approaches and the language-in-use paradigm in linguistic anthropology is Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996). Based on extensive fieldwork in New York City, the book shows how jazz musicians create meaningful performances in which musical ideas are developed within and between performative contexts, and how musicians use language metaphors to describe the musical practice of improvisation. For Monson, the most poignant of these metaphors is the notion that improvisation is a “conversation” between musicians who are performing together onstage; in this context, the musicians label a particularly good improvisatory performance as one in which the performers are “saying something.” While Monson takes seriously her interlocutors’ perspectives on the connection between music and language, she also acknowledges that their ideas require some unpacking to fit within contemporary linguistic theory. To make this point, Monson draws extensively from linguistic anthropology to move beyond the structural linguists’ focus upon referential meanings. In so doing, she shows how language and music do not only convey ideas, but also create social and affective relationships between people. Monson’s language-in-use approach has significant implications for the politics of music. In ways that parallel Paul Gilroy’s work on African American musics (1993), Monson argues that race and racial consciousness are critical for understanding musical performance in jazz. This is an important ethical and political point, as African American genres of ­artistic expression have been consistently denigrated throughout American history yet have come to dominate the international music industry. Jazz music, she notes, has always been inflected by the jazz musicians’ styles of speaking, which have, in turn, been inflected by African  American cultural practices of conversational play. Monson’s exploration of ­music and verbal play is particularly productive for her analysis of musical allusions in jazz, which includes not only the improvising soloist’s quotation of melodies from other pieces or performances, but also rhythms, timbres, and other subtler musical components. Despite drawing connections between musical and linguistic performance, Monson is unwilling to reduce musical experience to a species of text. Thus, rather than interpreting jazz in terms of “intertextuality,” a term employed by literary critics to describe how any text emerges

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out of and refers to the literary fields of other texts (Kristeva 1980; Hanks 1989), Monson understands jazz in terms of “intermusicality,” a term that she coined to describe how performers within a musical tradition respond in the moment to musical ideas in ways that do not require the mediation of language (127–29). Drawing from Peirce and the linguist Michael Silverstein, she notes that any instance of musical quotation involves both an iconic relationship with the musical idea that is quoted and an indexical relationship to a previous performance. She further argues that musical quotation, and musical allusions more broadly, necessarily involves semiotic transformation (i.e. shifts in musical meaning), as quotation and allusion foreground the differences between past and present performances. In some cases, these allusions ironically invert the meanings of past performances. One of the examples that Monson develops to describe this phenomenon is John Coltrane’s 1960 recording of the Broadway standard “My Favorite Things.” In her analysis, Monson demonstrates how Coltrane’s transformations of the harmony, form, and melody of the composition not only comment on the original song, but also provide subtle reflections upon the aesthetic values of jazz as compared to those of Broadway music, and ultimately, upon race in American music and culture. Monson’s insights have important implications for the study of musical form, as her work shows the impossibility of separating music analysis from social analysis. In the same way that people create social structures and social contexts in their linguistic interactions, so too does improvisation simultaneously draw from traditions and create new contexts. The real achievement of Monson’s work is to bring linguistic approaches into the analysis of musical form in ways that do not reify music or language into structures but instead reveal the unfolding of significances over time.18 While Monson’s notion of intermusicality provides a useful approach to understanding musical meaning on the basis of musical sound, other scholars have examined the way that music and language are combined in performance, such as when words are set to music in song. Examining the connections between music, song texts, and the sound of the human voice, Aaron Fox’s Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (2004) works through the implications of developing semiotic approaches in ethnomusicology, while incorporating Bakhtin’s notions of “dialogism” and “chronotope” ([1979] 1987). In this ethnography of the country music scene of Lockhart, Texas, Fox illustrates how the meanings of voice and lyrics cannot be simply or easily disentangled in American country music, or, indeed, any genre of vocal expression. As both spoken and sung texts, country songs are interwoven into everyday conversation, and Fox shows how their connections enable his interlocutors to voice their experiences of the world from a variety of perspectives that are irreducible to language alone. (On language choice and dialect in music, see Berger and Carroll 2003; on voice, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume.) At the start of this chapter, I pointed to the difficulties with the idea of music as a universal language. Setting that idea in the context of linguistic approaches to ethnomusicology, we can see that music need not make fixed references to things in the world (i.e. signifieds) in order to be meaningful. When it is performed in speech events, language itself does not have wholly fixed meanings, as language-in-use might dynamically evoke any number of associations and social implications. While some kinds of music might have relatively stable sets of meanings within a musical community (with or without mediation by language), most musical experiences and identities can, at minimum, be framed through speech about music. In this context, semiotic approaches provide a way to analyze the processes of meaning making in music without reducing musical meanings to linguistic ones. In so doing, such approaches allow us to understand how meanings are created and shared between performers and audiences, even as we account for the possibility of divergent perspectives.

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“Pal pal hai bhaari”: Music and Meaning in a Bollywood Song To illustrate the utility of some of these linguistic and semiotic approaches to music, I turn to an analysis of the song “Pal pal hai bhaari” (These heavy moments, hereafter referred to as PPHB), which was written by the legendary composer A. R. Rahman and sung by Madhushree (voicing the heroine) and Vijay Prakash (voicing the hero)19 in the 2004 ­Hindi-language film ­ oment Swades (Dir. Ashutosh Gowariker).20 The song appears at a musically and socially rich m in the film with many layers of meaning—layers that can be productively interpreted using the tools of linguistics and semiotics. The song itself is multidimensional, with lyrics, melody, meter, musical form, instrumentation, vocal timbre, studio recording, and sound ­engineering operating in tandem with the acting, dance, cinematography, lighting, set design, and ­narrative to create an extraordinarily dense set of signs. Of course, the scene in which this song appears can be made meaningful by different audiences in different ways, and the same audience member will find different meanings each time she sees and hears the film. One could write a book about this song alone and still not encompass all of its rich meaning. In the discussion that follows, I focus on only a few of these many elements. A short account of my own relationship to PPHB might prove to be instructive. I first encountered this composition when I listened to the Swades film soundtrack while conducting fieldwork in India from 2003 to 2005. The soundtrack was released several months before the film’s debut, a conventional practice for big-budget Bollywood films that is used to generate an initial buzz through promotion of the music. While I heard the song many times before watching Swades in a Mumbai movie theater in 2004, I did not know how it fitted into the film’s narrative. Because the meanings of PPHB were so closely connected to the scene in which the song appears, it never became a hit single, like other songs from the film (e.g. “Yun hi chala” and “Yeh taara woh taara”). After 2004, I had little exposure to the song until I began teaching Swades to my Bollywood film class in 2013. In this new context, I gave the song the attention that it deserved. Since then, I have listened carefully to it many times. Most of my insights about PPHB did not come to me at once: they unfolded over time, as the product of many repeated encounters with the audio recording of the song and the video of the film. The meanings that one might attribute to the music of the song, its lyrics, and cinematographic representation are inflected by its role within the narrative context of the film. Swades [Homeland] was a flop at the Indian box office, but it remains relatively popular among Indian diasporic populations. It depicts an Indian expatriate, played by the actor Shah Rukh Khan, who, after being reminded of the untimely death of his parents, travels to an ­Indian village in hopes of bringing the nanny who raised him back to the United States to share his life of relative luxury. Meanwhile, he grapples with his own Indian-ness and learns that his skills as a NASA engineer are needed at home to address India’s social problems. One of seven songs written for Swades, PPHB appears approximately three-quarters of the way into the film, during a depiction of the festival of Dussehra, an important holiday in the Hindu calendar, which occurs in October or November of the Gregorian calendar. This religious festival is observed differently in various regions of the Indian subcontinent. In western India where the film is set, Dussehra celebrates the victory of the Hindu god Ram over the demon god Ravana, as well as the reunification of Ram with his consort Sita. Further, the festival is also the season for performances of the folk religious play Ramlila, which enacts the Hindu epic known as the Ramayana.21 The seven-minute song sequence that contains PPHB depicts the end of the village’s performance of the Ramlila. Here, Ram defeats Ravana and is reunited with Sita as the film’s protagonist works through his sense of duty to his homeland. In the cultural context of contemporary Bollywood film music, PPHB is a highly significant composition, and, in many ways, is amenable to structural analysis. Unlike most

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contemporary Hindi film songs, PPHB draws melodic modes from India’s raga system, though it does so without being strictly bound by all of the melodic conventions of ragas.22 In PPHB, A. R. Rahman draws ideas from several ragas. In the opening, unmetered portion of the song, for example, the singer gestures toward the pakad (repeated identifying phrase) of Rag Jaunpuri, and the central refrain is based upon a Jaunpuri-derived musical mode. Similarly, the melodies of other parts of the song gesture toward other ragas (e.g. Rag Kaafi, Rag Jaijaiwanti) in ways that do not always explicitly follow their melodic conventions. As I noted earlier in this chapter, the raga form is well-suited to methods of music analysis adapted from structural linguistics, as the system-internal differentiation among the modes of correct raga performance are well-defined within India’s philosophical traditions, which date back at least to the eighth century CE and were further systematized by subsequent philosophical treatises. A system of sign values in Saussure’s sense of the term, ragas are defined in relationship to one another; as a result, a change in the way that the notes and ornaments of one raga are performed will result in a change in the definition of other ragas in the system.23 These performative modes were further developed by late-colonial Indian musicologists like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860–1936), who sought to construct a pan-Indian art music in service of cultural nationalism. In this context, the distinction in Indian music theory between the raga system and its embodiment in performance is broadly analogous to Saussure’s distinction between language and speech, insofar as they both imagine that the creation of meaningful musical ideas is developed from within an abstract system possessed by a musical community. Likewise, Chomsky’s notion of “generative grammar” is analogous to Indian ideas about musical creativity, with both theories imagining novel forms emerging from an underlying set of rules ( Jairazbhoy 1971; Wade 1977). The analysis of a musical performance that draws from the raga system is also amenable to semiotic analysis, insofar as the performance of each raga indexes a wide range of meanings, such as particular seasons, times of day, stylized emotions (rasa), and gods and goddesses. For audiences attuned to classical Indian aesthetic theories in music, drama, and dance, the use of Raj Jaunpuri in the melody of PPHB might index the aesthetic experience of karuna rasa (sadness, lamentation, compassion), the late morning, and/or the place and history of Jaunpur (a city in North India). For educated listeners, each of these associations operates as symbols in Peirce’s sense, as the connection between the sound of the raga and its meaning is based on sets of conventions. For other listeners, however, these musical gestures do not point to the individual ragas but instead index the raga system as a whole, which, in turn, is iconic of Rahman’s familiarity with Indian classical music and the broad cultural nationalism to which it is tied. Most contemporary listeners, I would speculate, simply do not hear any relationship between PPHB and India’s art music traditions and draw most of their insights about the song from the experience of watching it on-screen. The song’s melody and its meanings do not exhaust the significance of PPHB, as there are many other qualities of the composition, its performance, and its relationship to ­Indian society more generally that can be revealed from semiotically inflected perspectives. For instance, the stylized (or mediated) folk performance style of the Ravana character in the song sequence (voiced by Ashutosh Gowariker) is recognizable as a Bollywood r­ epresentation of a folk performance because it bears an iconic relationship with other Ramlila performances that are recognizable to all Indian audiences.24 Sung in a declamatory style, the music indexes and is iconic of other varieties of Hindu folk performance, as well as televisual and cinematic renditions of these songs (e.g. the Mahabharata and Ramayana television series). For audiences who are well-versed in the Ramlila and who are cognizant of how this cinematic rendition deviates from folk performances, this moment in PPHB operates on the iconic and indexical levels. However, there are other, more subtle signs in this song. For many audiences familiar with Hindi language cinema, this recording will index A.

44  Jayson Beaster-Jones

R. Rahman’s “sound” or “style”—even if they cannot describe the aspects of the song and its production that evoke his work. The combination of a synthesizer pad with an Indian classical drone is in line with Rahman’s approach, as is his distinctive orchestration of low strings, his emphasis on the bansuri bamboo flute (performed by Naveen Kumar), and the integration of North Indian folk instruments with choral singing, synthesizers, and drum loops.25 As important for indexing Rahman’s style as melody, harmony, timbre, or orchestration is the track’s studio production—the clarity of each instrument in the mix, the recording’s broad frequency spectrum, and the use of certain digital effects (e.g. delay and compression), which become signs of the era of film song in which he is composing. Another Rahman signature is the song’s overall structure, which extends the typical ­mukhda-antara (refrain-verse) form found in most Hindi film songs (see Beaster-Jones 2015) to include the declamatory style in the voice of Ravana, discussed above. The last section of PPHB shifts from a duet between the lead singers to a full-fledged bhajan (Hindu devotional hymn) sung by a chorus; here, the solo singers drop out, the meter changes, drums and finger cymbals are added to the instrumentation, and a chorus sings a repeated refrain (“Look, Lord Ram has come… here he comes to rescue me”). The use of bhajan style is also signaled in the film with images of villagers rising to their feet, praying, singing, and clapping—an index of the hymn’s affective power for the villagers, and, presumably, for some members of the film audience as well. The meanings that the sound of the bhajan carries in the film, coupled with its representation of that genre’s importance in folk culture, support Turino’s argument about the way that dense sets of indexes operate as signs of and for affect and experience; these semiotic processes are amenable to an analysis through Nattiez’s tripartition model, as well. Finally, the lead singer’s timbre and vocal style index the period in which the song was produced—a moment when the sound of women’s singing voices on-screen were moving away from earlier norms of vocal production. Singer Madhushree performs in the vocal register and style of the widely recorded singer Lata Mangeshkar, adopting her use of Indian semi-classical ornamentation. Despite drawing on the vocal inflections of classic Hindi film song vocalists, Madhushree’s timbre and the style of music production in the track clearly locates the music in the early twenty-first century, even as it reflects the musical values of earlier periods of film song. This discussion of PPHB has identified some of the diverse ways that this song might invoke meanings for its Indian audiences. However, following from Turino’s work, I would emphasize that as an individual listener, I too have developed my own affective and mnemonic relationships with this music. Each of my own encounters with PPHB has accreted new sets of associations and meanings, ones that transcend any of its musical characteristics. The collected sounds that make up this song are connected to my experience of a particular historical moment, the stages of my life in which I heard it, and innumerable other ineffable connections. As these affective resonances of PPHB suggests, linguistic and semiotic analysis provides ethnomusicologists with tools to account for manifold forms of meaning, from those that are widely shared to those that are highly individual, and from those that are relatively stable to those that change over time.

Looking Ahead The study of music making as a mode of communication has many parallels with the study of language as a mode of communication, not the least of which is the shift from a focus on systems to an attention to situated meaningful practices. One result of this paradigmatic shift is the recognition that, in their cognitive, affective, and social dimensions, music and language both communicate far more than we once thought. Treating music as a mode of communication and a form of situated practice, a range of new questions are coming into the view of

Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  45

contemporary ethnomusicologists. To what extent are the meanings created by and through music an inherent property of music sound and music structure? How does interpreting those sounds and structures require musical competence, and what might “competence” mean in the context of music? Inasmuch as the meanings associated with sound emerge from outside of the musical system (e.g. habits, practices, ideologies, worldviews), how can we integrate the structural analysis of music with pragmatic and contextual approaches? Is it possible to develop an analytically useful science of music that would provide comparable insights to linguistic science? With these and other questions in mind, perhaps we can finally turn away from the question of music as a universal language, and instead study language as a universal music.26 To that end, a number of recent and innovative approaches in ethnomusicology expand the investigations of music and language as modes of communication into new domains. Some of these approaches operate on a Peircean semiotic infrastructure that extends into the social and cognitive science realms. For instance, Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sager, and Udo Will (2005) and Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante (2013) explore the phenomenon of “rhythmic entrainment,” that is, the ways in which individuals and groups synchronize their speech patterns, behaviors, and music making. Inasmuch as these authors draw from biological and neuroscientific studies of circadian rhythms, as well as from research on ­m icrosocial interaction in music and speech, they suggest that even if music is not a universal language, rhythmic entrainment is a universal human capacity. Entrainment has thus become one fruitful way to explore how the rhythms of speech, ritual, poetic and musical meter, and other expressive forms illuminate the ways in which humans experience coordination, solidarity, and intimacy, and they do so in ways that can inform the quantitative social sciences. Anna Stirr (2010a, 2010b, 2017) explores similar questions of human sociability by drawing from the work of linguistic anthropologists and literary theorists. She shows how competence in both poetic and musical meters, and their performance in time, enables the creation of social worlds through song. Finally, a body of work exploring language revitalization movements and their relationship to musical revitalization (Faudree 2013; Minks 2013; Grant 2014; Samuels 2015) is providing significant insights into the cooperation of music and language as modes of communication, while also evoking classic questions about musical communities and identities, which are at the core of ethnomusicology as a discipline. It is clear that, taken as a whole, linguistic and semiotic approaches to ethnomusicological analysis are very much relevant to the contemporary field of ethnomusicology, even if the kinds of questions that we ask today are significantly different from the questions of our predecessors.

Notes 1 These questions have been addressed by a wide variety of ethnomusicologists. See, for example, Charles Seeger’s work on musical communication (1977) and John Blacking’s discussion of the social value of music (1969). 2 Like other scholars whose work is inflected by linguistic theory, I use the term semiology as the label for Saussure’s theory of sign relations and theories derived from it, and semiotic (without an “s”) as a label for Peirce’s theory of sign relations and theories derived from it. To refer to the study of signs in general, scholars typically use the term semiotics. 3 This notion—that in any given society, musical structure and social structure will have the same form—is often referred to as “homology theory” and appears in many different guises in twentiethcentury research on music and culture. See the primary discussion of homology theory in Peter ­Manuel’s chapter on Marxism and ethnomusicology, and a related analysis in Matthew Rahaim’s chapter on theories of participation. —Harris M. Berger 4 Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) is best known for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the notion that the structure of an individual language conditions the ways in which its speakers experience the world around them. Many of the essays in which Whorf framed this hypothesis were published in the 1930s and early 1940s, and are reprinted in Whorf (1964).

46  Jayson Beaster-Jones 5 On the politics of representation, see also Berger and Stone (this volume, introduction, n. 1). On colonialism in ethnomusicology, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume). 6 The theme of situated practice is also central to a body of theoretical work known as practice theory. See Text Box 2.1. 7 Jakobson, along with Goffman, Bateson, and Austin (discussed below), were also foundational for the development of performance studies. See Waterman (this volume). 8 The language-in-use perspectives discussed here were also foundational for the branch of performance studies that developed within linguistic anthropology and folklore, and Richard Bauman was a central figure in this area. For a brief history of performance folkloristics, see Text Box 6.1. 9 See also the work of linguist Michael Silverstein (1979, 2004), whose dense prose style can be difficult for newcomers but nevertheless reveals fascinating insights into the way in which language both situates and is situated by cultural context. 10 For a useful discussion of Peirce’s model of the sign, see Parmentier (1994) and Atkin (2013). 11 Indeed, linguistic interactions are as much about mistakes, misfires, or misinterpretations—that is, moments when the intentions of the speaker do not match the interpretation of the hearers—as they are about shared meanings that are communicated within a shared language structure. 12 See Faudree (2012) for a discussion of the ideological distinctions between music and speech. 13 For example, in certain social science disciplines (e.g. linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology), scholars like Steven Pinker (2003), Daniel Levitin (2006), and Aniruddh Patel (2010) have taken a reductionist approach to music by suggesting that it evolved as little more than a species of language prosody (patterns of language stress and rhythm), a view that focuses entirely upon the biological and neurological evolution of human music making while dismissing as largely irrelevant all of the cultural dimensions of music. 14 See Jairazbhoy (1971) and Wade (1977) for further discussions of the raga system. 15 Scholars in the branch of performance studies associated with folklore and linguistic anthropology made related critiques of textualism. See Text Box 6.1. 16 See Brackett (2000) for a discussion of how this operates in the context of Western popular musics. 17 On Bourdieu, see also Manuel (this volume), Sugarman (this volume), and Text Box 2.1. 18 For further discussion of Monson’s insights into music and race, see Mahon (this volume). On ­Monson’s place in critical improvisation studies, see Waterman (this volume). 19 Very few actors in Indian cinema sing: the singing voices of their characters are recorded in studios by professional “playback singers.” Actors then lip sync to these pre-recorded songs. 20 As of the time of this writing, this song can easily be viewed on YouTube and other online streaming services. 21 The Ramlila primarily exists in oral tradition, and hundreds of versions of the Ramayana are performed in different parts of Asia (Ramanujan 1991). For discussions of Ramlila performances, see Schechner and Hess (1977) and Sax (1990). 22 Until the 1960s, it was common for film song composers to self-consciously use elements of the raga system in their work, but, by the twenty-first century, the practice has become quite rare. 23 Kaufmann (1965) and Manuel (1981) both discuss historical changes in the ragas in ways that are amenable to Saussure’s notion of sign value systems. Manuel discusses Rag Juanpuri in particular. 24 See Beaster-Jones (2015) for a discussion of the mediation of musical styles. 25 See Sarrazin (2008) for a general discussion of Rahman’s contributions to Hindi film song. 26 I borrow this turn of phrase from my colleague Katherine Meizel (personal communication).

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Linguistic and Semiotic Approaches  49 Manuel, Peter. 1981. “The Evolution of Todi Raag-s in Indian Music.” Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 12 (3): 14–30. Marcus, George E., and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Meyer, Leonard B. 1960. “Universalism and Relativism in the Study of Ethnic Music.” Ethnomusicology 4 (2): 49–54. Minks, Amanda. 2013. Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Molino, Jean. 1975. “Fait musical et sémiologie de la musique.” Musique en jeu 17: 37–62. ———. 1978. “Sur la situation du symbolique.” L’Arc 72: 20–25. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1975. Fondements d’une Sémiologie de la Musique. Paris: Union Generale d’Editions. ———. 1990. Music and Discourse. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Negus, Keith. 1999. Music Genres and Corporate Cultures. New York: Routledge. Parmentier, Richard J. 1994. Signs in Society: Studies in Semiotic Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Patel, Aniruddh. 2010. Music, Language, and the Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1960. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume II: Elements of Logic. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perlman, Alan M., and Daniel Greenblatt. 1981. “Miles Davis Meets Noam Chomsky: Some Observations on Jazz Improvisation and Language Structure.” In The Sign in Music and Literature, edited by Wendy Steiner, 169–84. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pinker, Steven. 2003. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin. Ramanujan, A. K. 1991. “Three Hundred Rāmāya ṇ as: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” In Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman, 22–50. Berkeley: University of California Press. Samuels, David. 2015. “Music’s Role in Language Revitalization.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25 (3): 346–55. Sarrazin, Natalie. “Songs from the Heart: Musical Coding, Emotional Sentiment, and Transnational Sonic Identity in India’s Popular Film Music.” In Global Bollywood, edited by Anandam Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, 203–22. New York: NYU Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1916) 1998. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Roy Harris. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Sawyer, R. Keith. 1996. “The Semiotics of Improvisation: The Pragmatics of Musical and Verbal Performance.” Semiotica 108 (3–4): 269–306. Sax, William S. 1990. “The Ramnagar Ramlila: Text, Performance, Pilgrimage.” History of Religions 30 (2): 129–53. Schechner, Richard, and Linda Hess. 1977. “The Ramlila of Ramnagar [India].” TDR: The Drama Review 21 (3): 51–82. Schieffelin, Edward L. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Seeger, Charles. 1977. “Speech, Music, and Speech about Music.” In Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology.” In The Elements: A Para­ session on Linguistic Units and Levels, edited by R. Clyne, W. Hanks and C. Hof bauer. Chicago: ­Chicago ­Linguistic Society. ———. 2004. “‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus.” Current Anthropology 45 (5): 621–52. Silverstein, Michael, and Greg Urban, eds. 1996. Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan.

50  Jayson Beaster-Jones Stern, Theodore. 1957. “Drum and Whistle ‘Languages’: An Analysis of Speech Surrogates.” American Anthropologist 59 (3): 487–506. Stirr, Anna. 2010a. “Singing Dialogic Space into Being: Communist Language and Democratic Hopes at a Radio Nepal Dohori Competition.” Studies in Nepali History and Society 15 (2): 297–330. ———. 2010b. “‘May I Elope’: Song Words, Social Status, and Honor among Female Nepali Dohori Singers.” Ethnomusicology 54 (2): 257–80. ———. 2017. Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal. New York: Oxford University Press. Stokes, Martin. 1997. “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity, and Music.” In Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, edited by Martin Stokes. New York: Bloomsbury. Tagg, Philip. 1987. “Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music.” Semiotica 66 (1/3): 279–298. ———. 1993. “‘Universal’ Music and the Case of Death.” Critical Quarterly 35 (2): 54–85. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1976. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical Background. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tarasti, Eero. 1987. “Semiotics of Music.” Semiotica 66 (1/3): 1–330. Taylor, Timothy. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge. Toynbee, Jason. 2000. Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity, and Institutions. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Turino, Thomas. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43 (2): 221–55. ———. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Terence S. 1977. “Narrative Structure and Mythopoesis: A Critique and Reformulation of Structuralist Concepts of Myth, Narrative, and Poetics.” Arethusa 19: 103–63. Wade, Bonnie C. 1977. Music in India: The Classical Traditions. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Warner, Michael. 2005. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Welton, Don, ed. 1999. The Body. Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. (1910–1913) 1962. Principia Mathematica. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1964. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1921) 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Company. ———. (1953) 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Edited by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

2 Marxist Approaches to Music, Political Economy, and the Culture Industries Ethnomusicological Perspectives Peter Manuel Marxist analytical approaches to art and culture have significant affinities with those of ethnomusicology. Both sets of approaches insist on studying an aspect of expressive culture— such as a musical entity—not merely as a text or artifact, but also as a product or practice embedded in and conditioned by its broader socio-historical context. Both approaches seek to understand the nature and extent of the agency and autonomy that artists and consumers can exercise within their socio-economic milieus, as well as the ways that music can either reinforce or challenge a dominant social order. And just as ethnomusicologist ­Steven Feld (1988) has explored ways in which the sound structure of New Guinean tribal music recapitulates aspects of social structure, so Marxist-informed theorists have argued that musical forms in modern Western society—be it of popular songs or a piano sonata— have evolved in accordance with general aesthetic principles ultimately conditioned by the socio-­economic base of capitalism. Accordingly, a number of ethnomusicologists have used explicitly Marxist approaches, and a great many others have been at least indirectly informed by them. Particularly influential has been the field of cultural studies, which developed a flexible and nuanced understanding of the dynamics of hegemony and resistance, and extended such analytical tools beyond the traditional Marxist emphasis on class to engage dimensions of ethnicity, race, gender, and other social categories. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the single most original and influential economist and political philosopher of the nineteenth century, and, arguably, of the entire century after his death. Marx lived in a time of epic political struggles and convulsions, including the French Revolution of 1848 and the brief rule of the Paris Commune in 1871. This was a period in which a triumphant industrial and bourgeois capitalism generated unprecedented wealth and development, while at the same time condemning masses of people to new forms of urban exploitation, squalor, and misery. Such conditions generated widespread working-class radicalism and animated Marx’s own interpretation of current events and European history. Most importantly, the overt class dynamics of upheavals such as the Parisian uprisings inspired Marx to see class struggle as the single most important aspect of history in general. Marx’s prodigious literary output included journalistic articles, obscure partisan ­polemics, and major analytical studies, which are still widely read. His most important work was Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), a rigorous study integrating his theoretical perspectives with an exhaustive account of contemporary working conditions in Great Britain. A more accessible and concise work is the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” ([1848] 1959, co-authored with Friedrich Engels), whose opening section presents a remarkably pithy, powerful, and eminently quotable history of the triumph of capitalism. This section can also be read as a seminal and classic description of the effects of modernity in general, in its various facets encompassing technological revolution, capitalism, the

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nation-state, rationalism, conceptions of universal human rights, and new social formations and senses of individual subjectivity.1 Modernity, as Marx showed, engendered an unprecedented degree of personal and collective liberation and achievement, unleashed remarkable powers of economic productivity, and freed much of Europe from the authority of the aristocracy and the Church. At the same time, it immiserated the working classes, accelerated the growth of colonialism, and engendered unprecedented forms of spiritual alienation. With the ascendancy of capitalism in modern Europe, Marx and Engels noted, “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,” and “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….” ([1848] 1959: 10). In retrospect, it is easy to see that Marx’s predictions about proletarian revolution were mistaken and that he greatly overestimated the extent of working-class consciousness and solidarity, both in his own time and in the future. Much of his writing, however, is remarkably prescient in its descriptions of the dynamics of globalization and the penetration of capital and bourgeois ideology throughout the world. Marx’s extensive writings are primarily devoted to the critical analysis of capitalism as a socio-economic system and do not discuss the arts in detail. However, his insights on culture and ideology are powerful and provocative. Embedded in a deep and original analysis of capitalism, these insights have inspired generations of theorists to develop diverse sorts of Marxist-informed analyses of expressive culture. While many such studies have been purely analytical, others have been activist and engaged in character, often seeking to challenge aspects of capitalist economic and ideological hegemony. (On the distinction between analytic and activist theory, see Berger and Stone, Introduction, this volume). The failure and abandonment of communism in China and the former Eastern Bloc have not diminished the value of Marxist interpretations of the complex relationships between society, economy, and culture.

Music and Modes of Production: Epochal Changes, from Feudalism to Neoliberalism A fundamental concept in Marx’s work is the means of production—the ensemble of technologies and forms of social organization by which a society satisfies its material needs. Throughout his work, Marx makes a fundamental and seminal distinction between a society’s socio-economic base (that is, the mode of production predominant in a society) and its cultural and ideological superstructure (the sets of beliefs and practices circulating in that society). Marx believed that the base ultimately informs the superstructure. As he wrote, “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life” ([1859] 1959: 43). An analytical “vulgar materialism” would see the economic base as directly determining the nature of the superstructure. Marx, however, disavowed the crudely deterministic versions of this idea, and the thinkers who followed him have developed more nuanced and productive ideas about the relationship between a society’s economic base and its culture. British Marxists such as Raymond Williams (1921–1988) and Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) devoted much of their writings to this question, attempting to understand how the realm of culture could enjoy a certain sort of “relative autonomy” within the constraints and pressures exerted by the socio-economic base (Williams 1980; Eagleton 1976, 1983). Williams, while insisting on the importance of these economic factors, argued astutely that they have been most visible in terms of grand epochal stages (e.g. feudalism or capitalism); that base and superstructure are constantly in flux; that the two together constitute a single organic entity, such that,

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for example, capitalism comprises a cultural as well as economic system; and that the cultural superstructure itself is a heterogeneous entity encompassing a range of practices and beliefs, including both “residual” elements that linger on from past historical periods and newly “emergent” ones. Various scholars of Western culture have written, from diverse Marxist perspectives, about the epochal transition from feudalism to capitalism and its ramifications in the arts, including classical music. As Marxists and others have stressed, feudalism and capitalism constituted not only modes of production, but also associated systems of social practice and personal subjectivity. Hence, feudalism comprised, in a primarily agrarian society, a system in which commerce, commodity production, and the use of money were limited, and surplus value was extracted from vassals by landed lords who, in turn, owed fealty to a more powerful court or despot. Social relations, subjectivity, and aesthetics in feudal society were characterized by a dogmatic and unquestioning conservatism and a disinterest in rationality and individualism. For its part, capitalism implies such features as extensive wage labor, commodity production for sale, systems of credit and finance, and competition that generates mass production and industrial innovation. In the realm of culture and social practice, this mode of production, in turn, has promoted a spirit of innovation, individualism, and a freedom from tradition which can be experienced either as exhilarating or alienating. Marxist theorists have taken much interest in the cultural ramifications of the advent of capitalism. A particularly magisterial study is A Social History of Art ([1951] 1957), by the Hungarian scholar Arnold Hauser (1892–1978). Hauser offered penetrating insights into the cultural and economic forces that allowed European composers to free themselves from feudal patronage. Haydn, for example, labored largely as a court musician for the Count of Esterhazy; his contemporary Mozart also worked for nobles but began to compose as well for public performances of music and light operas, which were marketed to a paying audience, including the emerging bourgeoisie. With Beethoven, the transition was complete, engendering in the process several developments, including: a new Romantic conception of the artist as an individualistic genius; a celebration of music (and art in general) as an autonomous entity valuable precisely because it was free from church and court patronage; the cultivation of a personal, dramatic, often sentimental style (in contrast, for example, to the impersonal and erudite Baroque fugue); and a new attitude toward compositions as pieces that could be performed repeatedly, rather than being commissioned for a single performance or event by a court or the church. Concomitant with these developments was an explicit aesthetic of “art for art’s sake,” involving, as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) put it in A Critique of Pure Reason (1780), a “­d isinterested” stance on the part of the audience. (This would contrast with a non-­ aesthetic, “­interested” attitude on the part of, for example, the viewer of a painting, who considers whether he should buy it as an investment or who fantasizes a romantic relationship with the person depicted therein.) An influential perspective on this aesthetic was developed by the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). In his book Distinction (1984), Bourdieu shows how this ­K antian disinterestedness, this “purposiveness without a purpose,” is itself paradoxically functional and purposeful, in the sense of being cultivated by the well-educated elite as a sign of social superiority. Bourdieu popularized the notion of “cultural capital,” connoting the actual material advantages that can accompany the acquisition of education and aesthetic sophistication.2 While Bourdieu himself saw cultural capital as a feature uniquely associated with elite culture, a wide range of scholars have developed this idea to understand the dynamics of popular music scenes (e.g. Thornton 1996, Kahn-Harris 2006).

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Text Box 2.1  Practice Theory Bourdieu’s work is part of movement within sociology and related disciplines known as “practice theory,” which seeks to make social practice the focus of theoretical and empirical research in the humanities and social sciences (Rouse 2007). Central concerns of practice theory include the relationship between structure and agency, the ways in which situated social conduct is both shaped by and constitutive of ­macro-level social orders, the role of culture in patterns of domination and exploitation, and the nature of embodiment. (On embodiment, see Text Box 1.1.) In many of its forms, practice theory was developed as a variety of neo-Marxism, and it emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a group of key publications by Bourdieu (1977, 1990), Anthony Giddens ([1976] 1993, 1979, 1984), and Michel de Certeau (1984). (It is worth noting that while Giddens’s early work could safely be categorized as neo-Marxist, his views shifted dramatically in the 1990s [Giddens 1994, 1998], when he embraced so-called “third way” politics. See Berger and Del Negro 2016 for further discussion.) In the last fifty years, practice theory has been highly influential. Sherry Ortner’s often-cited article “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties” (1984) chronicled the early adoption of practice theory in anthropology, and her writings continue to be central to the practice-oriented work in that field (2006). Within ethnomusicology, a range of scholars have drawn on ideas from practice theory to examine the role of music in social reproduction, the relationships among culture, power, and identity, and an array of linked issues (e.g. Seeger 1987; Sugarman 1997; Berger 1999, 2010; Mahon 2004). Ideas from the tradition have also become increasingly influential in folklore studies (e.g. Bronner 2012; Buccitelli and Schmitt 2016). Setting this work in a wider context, we can observe that practice theory is part of a broad trend across the humanities and social sciences that seeks to redirect attention toward situated activity, sees the analysis of decontextualized texts or abstract cognitive structures as misguided, and resists the idea that embodied social conduct is a fundamentally separate order of reality from social structure. In this book, the chapters by Sugarman, Mahon, and myself (Berger) address practice theory directly, but practice-oriented themes are present in many other chapters, including Beaster-Jones’s discussion of ­language-in-use perspectives in linguistics, Meizel and Daughtry’s remarks on the study of listening practices in sound studies, Rahaim’s history of theories of participation, and throughout Waterman’s chapter on performance studies and critical improvisation studies—fields that are fundamentally oriented toward the study of social practice. For a useful introduction to practice theory, see Rouse (2007; see also Schatzki et al. 2001). On Bourdieu and French post-structuralism, see Sugarman’s chapter in this volume. —Harris M. Berger German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) developed his own idiosyncratically Marxist perspectives on these developments. Among other topics, Adorno (1975) explored with great subtlety how music’s liberation from feudal patronage at once rendered it autonomous in certain ways while subjecting it to new market pressures. After Beethoven—who, for Adorno, represented a sort of sublime transitional figure—music was doomed either to be commercial in nature or else resolutely esoteric and thus socially marginal. In some respects like Bourdieu and unlike most ethnomusicologists, Adorno was more interested in ambivalently analyzing elite Western art culture than in exploring the music practices, forms, and aesthetics of other classes or ethnic groups.

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If Marxists within traditional humanities disciplines have explored the relationship between economic base and music in Europe, ethnomusicologists have written about parallel developments in non-Western cultures. A comparable case of an “epochal” transition from feudal to bourgeois capitalist patronage took place in India, starting around 1900 and reaching completion around 1950, when independent India abolished the remaining feudal princedoms. Before the twentieth century, patronage of classical music had been largely in the hands of the feudal nobility and, in the south, of Hindu temples. Feudal princes continued to employ musicians until losing their estates, but increasingly, from the turn of the century, public concerts were held for the emerging middle class. With the encouragement of activists such as V. D. Paluskar (1872–1931) in North India and liberal Brahman organizations in South India (especially Madras/Chennai), this new social class eventually came to enthusiastically support Indian classical music and dance as proud emblems of national identity that could be simultaneously Indian and modern. Without specifically invoking Marx, several ethnomusicologists, including Matthew Allen (1997, 2008), Lakshmi Subramanian (2006), and myself (Manuel 1989), together with scholars from other disciplines, such as historian Janaki Bakhle (2005), have written extensively about this complex transition. The process involved dynamics of gender as well as those of class, as women of “respectable” middle-class backgrounds gradually replaced courtesan performers. It also involved religion and ethnicity, as the predominantly Muslim feudal patrons and hereditary musicians in the North were increasingly supplanted by Hindu bourgeois patrons and performers. Using a more specifically Marxist perspective is Regula Qureshi (2000, 2002b), who was able to draw on recollections by elderly performers, as well as archival materials, to present an intriguing portrait of late feudal music patronage in North India, with its distinctive sorts of mutual obligations between artists and patrons. As she noted, several senior performers spoke nostalgically about the sophistication and generosity of the princes who supported and often lionized them, even as the new bourgeoisie—who proved to be ardent patrons of art music themselves—came to regard the feudal gentry as decadent relics of a bygone era.3 It was with the advent of industrial capitalism—and especially after the spread of recording technology from around 1900—that modern music industries emerged, introducing into music cultures new dimensions of commodification and new sorts of links and barriers between producers and consumers. Marx himself died in 1883, prior to these developments. In one of his few comments on music (in the Grundrisse, [1857–1861] 1973: 305), Marx stated that while a piano maker is clearly a productive worker, the labor of a pianist, although essential to the value of the piano itself, would stand somewhat ambiguously outside this process of reproducing capital, having use value but no exchange value. As has often been noted, this distinction obscures more than it clarifies, and with the advent of music industries, the labor of the performing musician would become inextricably bound up with capital, especially as commercial recordings became commodities with clear exchange value. Even radio and television audiences became commodities of sorts, with program content serving—from a financial perspective—merely as means to deliver consumers’ attention to commercial sponsors. Hence, less important than Marx’s problematic statement about music performance have been the ways in which his analytical approaches can be used to understand the operations of the new industry. The advent of modern music industries and commercial mass media had dramatic effects on music cultures throughout the world. Before the twentieth century, ordinary people everywhere used to make music, whether singing while working or in festive gatherings, or playing instruments as amateurs or professionals. In a classical Marxist view, the commercial music industry took the practice of music making away from most people and returned music to them in the form of a commodity to be purchased. Hence, whether in Turkey or Thailand, where a farm laborer might once have sung alone or with

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others, he would now be seen wearing headphones or earbuds, tuned in to the commercial hit parade produced in some distant city. At village weddings in India, the wedding songs sung by elderly women in local dialects and styles have increasingly been drowned out, or entirely replaced, by ­Bollywood film music blaring from overloaded loudspeakers. In the process, such individuals and their communities may become effectively alienated from their music-making ability, becoming passive consumers whose agency is reduced to choosing preferred music from the fare mass-produced for common-denominator audiences by giant multinationals based in far-off cities. Many years ago, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax warned that the onslaught of corporate-produced pop music would precipitate a “cultural grey-out” in which unique, venerable music traditions around the world would be “swept off the board.” As a result, he argued, whole cultures were being “left with a sense of belonging nowhere and we, ourselves, losing our local roots, become daily more alienated” (1968: 5). There is undoubtedly some truth to this scenario, though Marx himself would doubtless note that the mass media can fruitfully broaden one’s musical horizons beyond the proverbial “idiocy of rural life” (referred to in [1848] 1959: 11) At the same time, ethnomusicologists have found that many amateur and professional music-making traditions around the world have proven to be surprisingly resilient, even as they may adapt to changing times by selectively borrowing from commercial pop sounds. Moreover, new social classes may themselves become active patrons of new sorts of performance traditions. In her 1970s fieldwork among the Kpelle of Liberia, Ruth Stone (1982) found that a new, quasi-­proletarian class of rubber workers had emerged who were in a position to sponsor dance-music events. One ensemble she worked with offered its own syncretic style incorporating stray English phrases and elements of East African pop from records produced in Nairobi. The music, with its contemporary, cosmopolitan flavor, responded to (and would actively shape) the experiences and aspirations of the younger generation of workers in a way that traditional music could not. David Coplan reached similar conclusions about popular music elsewhere in West Africa, noting how genres such as highlife, rather than being superimposed by a remote corporate music industry, reflected and helped mold the sensibilities and aesthetics of wage-earning, media-connected city-dwellers who no longer related to “bush” life and culture (1982). The transition from feudalism to capitalism, the triumph of bourgeois ideology, and the emergence of modern music industries have together constituted aspects of an epochal change whose ramifications cannot be holistically understood without reference to Marxist-derived analytical approaches. Scholars have also identified major transformations within the capitalist period itself. Laissez-faire industrial capitalism was at its height in the Western world at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and was characterized by the unfettered growth of monopolistic corporations, intense conflicts between labor and management, the zenith of European colonialism, and wild boom/bust cycles. The so-called “golden age” of capitalism in Western Europe and the US emerged in the period after World War II and was typified by a détente between labor and management, a culture of consumption, relatively stable economic growth, the transition from political to economic colonialism, and various state measures to reign in the excesses of the capitalist system (e.g. social welfare provisions, anti-trust regulations, and health and safety legislation in the workplace). Many would argue that since the 1970s, another epochal transformation has occurred, to what has been variously called “late capitalism” or, more commonly in the contemporary intellectual scene, neoliberalism. While neoliberalism is in many respects a return to or intensification of laissez-faire capitalism, in some senses it constitutes a new entity, distinguished by increased privatization, deregulation, the deindustrialization of Europe and the US, globalization of production process and the

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circulation of media, a weakening of the state, and the expansion of capitalism and consumerist ideology into all aspects of daily life around the world. These developments have had various sorts of impact on global cultures. One has been the spread, especially since the 1980s, of a postmodern aesthetic sensibility which scholars such as Fredric Jameson (1984) and David Harvey (1990) have interpreted from ­Marxist perspectives as being grounded in structural economic changes. Postmodern aesthetics, with its use of playful pastiche, bricolage, “blank irony,” and quirky simulacra, has ­become a typical feature of much modern popular music,4 from music videos, to sampling in ­h ip-hop, to electronic dance music and beyond (Kaplan 1987; Straw 1988; Manuel 1995). As Javier León (2014) has noted, the impact of neoliberalism on music cultures would also include many other developments, from the defunding of state systems of music patronage to the collapsing of dichotomies of production and consumption. In Music and Capitalism (2016), Timothy Taylor explores various other ramifications of neoliberalism on music culture, including: the advent of new dimensions of marketing and branding; new forms of accommodation and interaction between musicians and commercial advertising; and new sorts of connections between music consumption, personal identity, and digitally mediated social interactions. Gavin Steingo’s work on popular music in South Africa (2016) illustrates other dynamics of musical production under conditions of neoliberalism. While Marx’s own analyses of production were mostly oriented toward the manufacturing of physical commodities, Steingo notes how musical production is, in fact, quite typical of the twenty-first century, where so much economic activity and production are based on information, intellectual property, and intangible entities like music, rather than the manufacturing of tangible goods. In fact, the advent of neoliberalism has coincided with—and been inseparable from—that of digital technologies, some of whose impact on music will be outlined below. As many scholars have noted, characteristically pre-modern, sentimental attitudes and aesthetics can exist in symbiotic relationships with modern, commodity-oriented counterparts. In an erudite 2002 article, Martin Stokes takes a neo-Marxist approach to the modes of musical production found in two different sorts of Turkish music scenes. In one scene—typified by a professional performer named Ibrahim—the inexorable force of capital and capitalism has “disenchanted” many aspects of traditional music making; Ibrahim is shrewdly up-to-date, pragmatic, and professional in his activities and happy to integrate his region’s distinctive traditions with the modern “national” aesthetics and instrumentation promoted by the state-run radio, for which he often composes and performs. Another musician, Necmi, epitomizes what could be seen as a more typically pre-modern aesthetic: he is indifferent to commercial concerns, adheres to the distinctive fiddle music of his particular region, and is committed to keeping his music rooted in intimate social gatherings, rather than professional gigs and national projects. Stokes, however, uses a reinterpretation of Marx to argue that these seemingly distinct attitudes and practices can coexist and nourish each other, just as capital itself can operate through and use “difference,” rather than merely homogenizing music and socio-musical ideas.

Music and Socio-economic Class The Communist Manifesto asserted, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” ([1848] 1959: 7). Accordingly, subsequent Marxist studies of culture have consistently foregrounded class dynamics, even if most contemporary scholarship also recognizes the importance of other social factors, such as gender and ethnicity. Scholars also recognize that class boundaries are often indistinct, and even definitions of classes in

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capitalist society have varied. Marx conceived of the bourgeoisie as the dominant capitalist class that owns the means of production, though some contemporary authors—largely outside the Marxist tradition and writing in a loose and non-technical fashion—conflate the bourgeoisie with the “middle class,” encompassing relatively educated, white-collar w ­ orkers as a whole. However conceived, these groups would stand in contrast to the w ­ orking class, or proletariat—consisting quintessentially of wage-earning, blue-collar workers—and the lumpen proletariat of assorted drifters, hustlers, buskers, and the like. A number of ethnomusicological studies have highlighted the relations between particular music genres and the social classes in which they are grounded. As I have noted elsewhere (1988: 18–19), the urban lumpen proletariat, with its “unbound” creative energy and acute self-consciousness as a class, has played a disproportionately dynamic role in the creation of various music genres, including Greek rebetika, the Argentine tango, Indonesian kroncong, Jamaican dancehall, and African American hip-hop. Other works have explored in greater depth how music serves as a focal site for the articulation of working-class senses of community, identity, and aesthetics. In Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (2004), for example, Aaron Fox shows how country music and convivial discourse serve as ­ ­ostalgia, twin vehicles for the affirmation of a rural proletarian identity rooted in sociability, n “redneck” pride, and a combination of machismo and emotional vulnerability. A somewhat different form of working-class alienation—here in deindustrialized Akron, Ohio—is interpreted as animating the experience of the heavy metal fans in Harris M. Berger’s 1999 ­monograph, Metal, Rock and Jazz.5 Yet another study of music in working-class culture is Manuel Peña’s The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music (1985). Peña explores how the proletarian population in question has cherished accordion-based conjunto music as a distinctive emblem of both their ethnic and class identity, in contrast to more mainstream American musics and the more “genteel,” large-ensemble orquesta music. A different sort of perspective on class and music is presented by Taylor in The Sounds of Capitalism (2012). In one chapter, Taylor builds on Bourdieu’s ideas (1998, 2003) to focus on the experiences of the “new petite bourgeoisie,” a group that is akin to what Barbara and John Ehrenreich (1979) and others have called the “professional managerial class.” Taylor shows how such contemporary cultural workers (such as producers, music marketers, and agents) cultivate an aesthetic of hipness and coolness, comfortably mediate between high and low culture, and readily embrace consumerist dimensions of music, including its use in advertising. Charles Keil, a consistently original ethnomusicological thinker, offered still another kind of Marxist perspective on the relations among class, capitalism, and music in “People’s Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and Hegemony” (1994). Examining the trajectories of the blues and polka music in the US, Keil argued that dynamics of socio-economic class have in some respects been more important for these styles than factors of race or ethnicity. (While blues is traditionally celebrated as an African American art, Keil—somewhat blasphemously—pointed out that there were very few commercial recordings of black blues artists until around 1930, and by the latter 1960s the audience for blues was overwhelmingly white.) In such conditions, the efforts of black blues performers to cultivate a style cohering with the tastes of a proletarian black community had to be mediated through the pressures of the stereotypes sought by white bourgeois audiences. Keil identified similar dynamics in the polka music of Eastern European ethnic minorities in the US. In polka as with blues, style was conditioned by class forces. More specifically, Keil argued that a working-class ­community—be it a racial or ethnic minority—must somehow accept, digest, and “work through” dominant-class stereotypes in order to eventually transcend these borrowings.

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As Keil would acknowledge, the working-class aspects of both blues and polka are, of course, ultimately inseparable from their ethnic or racial associations, involving the sort of interplay between multiple dimensions referred to by contemporary scholars as “intersectionality” (see the chapters by Sugarman and Mahon, this volume.) Such ­intersectionality— whether labeled as such or not—is especially evident in studies of apartheid-era South Africa. As books by Veit Erlmann (1991) and David Coplan (1985) have shown, while class dynamics—especially involving proletarian and lumpen proletarian blacks and bourgeois whites—were clearly important, they were inseparable from issues of race and ethnicity (­involving, for instance, the complex relations between Zulus and Xhosas). Any black person’s sense of social identity—as reflected in or even shaped by his or her musical tastes— would necessarily be bound up with that person’s membership in a particular class and ethnic group. In these situations, music served as a particularly prominent site in which ethnic and class identity was negotiated.

Ideology, Hegemony, and Resistance in Music A recurrent theme of Marxist studies of art and culture concerns the ways that class struggle and class dynamics condition not only forms of art patronage and production, but also the implicit or explicit ideologies that art conveys. In some contexts, the word “ideology” can be used in a neutral sense to refer to a set of meanings, values, aesthetics, expectations, socio-political attitudes, and ways of conceiving the self and society in a culture. In ­M arxist thought, however, the word ideology is often given a more specific meaning, referring to the ways that these sets of ideas serve to legitimize, naturalize, and perpetuate the ­socio-economic hegemony exerted by the dominant class. Hegemonic ideologies, rather than being explicit and overt, are typically taken for granted and are most powerful when they are effectively invisible. Thus, for example, the hegemonic bourgeois ideology referred to by Marxists is so pervasive in contemporary capitalist societies that its existence is generally unquestioned, but, in fact, it would stand in sharp contrast to the prevailing worldview in contemporary North Korea, highland tribal New Guinea, or a Chinese village of the fourteenth century. Marxists would stress that bourgeois notions of individualism, rationality, private property, and modern political institutions are products of specific historical circumstances rather than “natural” and inevitable entities. Marxists have argued that while bourgeois ideology is dynamic, productive, and inclusive in its way, it also serves to obscure class consciousness and systems of domination, reinforcing exploitation and often inculcating a false consciousness in which people think, act, and vote in ways that are often contradictory to what would otherwise be their enlightened self-interest. Art and music are parts of the ideological superstructure, and, as noted above, even those forms of expressive culture that appear to be disinterested, socially autonomous forms of “art for art’s sake” are paradoxically ideological in celebrating their supposed freedom from ideology. Marx and Engels articulated a fundamental premise regarding ideological hegemony in The German Ideology ([1846] 1968): The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production… ([1846] 1968)

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Like Marx and Engels, many ethnomusicologists have been attentive to the broader ­socio-political dimensions of culture, especially in societies marked by sharp socio-­ economic and political divisions. Hence, ethnomusicologists have written extensively about such topics as the role of music in Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation (McDonald 2013a, 2013b), the struggle for social justice in Latin America (e.g. Moore 2003), and a­ nti-nuclear protests in Japan (Manabe 2016). However, not all of these studies utilize Marxist perspectives per se, which would entail not so much a pro-­ communist viewpoint but rather a use of Marxist analytical approaches to hegemony and resistance. Such perspectives have, in fact, animated a number of writings on Western popular music, which has been seen variously as a countercultural, subversive, and liberating form of grassroots art, or, alternately, as an inescapably commercial entertainment idiom that ultimately serves to reinforce bourgeois ideology by fetishizing stars and songs, and distracting and stupefying consumers. In fact, the first thinker to write incisively about commercial popular music was Adorno, whose 1941 essay “On Popular Music” has constituted a sort of starting point for critical discussions of the genre ([1941] 1976). Together with other scholars originally associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Adorno used Marxist ideas not to advocate socialism but to develop critical perspectives on capitalist society, especially in the wake of the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The ­F rankfurt School theorists—especially Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer—saw capitalist mass culture as manipulating and creating public needs rather than responding to them, and ultimately indoctrinating individuals being into passive consumers rather than critical thinkers or mobilized, self-aware activists. Adorno himself, largely uninterested in politics per se, mostly wrote about aesthetics and art, especially music ([1948] 1986, [1962] 1988, 1998). Adorno saw popular music as the product of a monolithic culture industry that works to exploit consumers while encouraging them to imagine that they are exercising free choice. Basing his assessment primarily on Tin Pan Alley songs of the 1930s, Adorno lambasted popular music for what he saw as its reliance on standardized, hackneyed formulas (such as the 32-bar aaba form) to mass-produce insipid, “pre-digested” songs that give, at best, a false impression of being original through a process of “pseudo-individualization” (1976, 2005). Adorno’s critique might seem to suggest simple elitist snobbery, but he was equally critical of aspects of high culture, and, in Marxist fashion, he saw commercial popular culture as being imposed on the public by a corporate entertainment industry rather than emerging from working-class society itself (2005). David Buxton ([1983] 1990) extended Adorno’s Marxist critique, arguing that the commercial music industry replaces organic culture with an alienating, consumerist star system, and that it profits from the regulation and organization of l­eisure time, just as Frederick Taylor’s principles of scientific management regimented the practices of factory workers at the turn of the twentieth century. A different Taylor—the aforementioned T ­ imothy—has employed a Marxist framework to document the history of music in ­A merican advertising, from sponsored radio programs through radio jingles to the ­present-day use of all manner of pop genres in television ads (2012). Adorno’s ideas have been much criticized, especially for their inattention to live performance, to the ways that listeners can derive their own uses and gratifications from music, and to the sociocultural spaces, margins, and ruptures in music cultures that allow various sorts of alternative, independent, and innovative music subcultures to develop (see, for example, Middleton 1990: Ch. 2; Paddison 1982).6 However,

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a few ethnomusicological studies have drawn selectively on Adorno’s approach. In my book Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (1993), I argued that the North Indian popular music industry exhibited some of the alienating features of “mass culture” critiqued by Adorno. Until the spread of cassettes in the mid-1980s, ­commercial popular music in North India consisted overwhelmingly of film music, set in a single language (Hindi), performed in a fairly standardized style, produced by a tiny coterie of Bombay-based composers and singers, and, via commercial Hindi films, effectively imposed on a vast, and vastly diverse, listening public. The advent of cassettes, however, dramatically democratized and decentralized the music industry, precipitating the emergence of hundreds of recording companies, large and small, that tailored their products to an unprecedented diversity of regional and community markets. The 1980s saw the emergence of the discipline of cultural studies, which expanded and enhanced Marxist-derived ideas in ways that have informed much subsequent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, including ethnomusicology. In the UK, the field originated at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. One basic contribution of Birmingham School cultural studies, as articulated by Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and others, was to develop ideas about hegemony ­ ntonio outlined in the 1930s by the Italian social theorist and Marxist revolutionary A Gramsci (1891–1937). Writing about capitalist societies (rather than communist dictatorships), Gramsci elucidated how dominant-class hegemony relies less on force than it does on the consent of the dominated. This ideological hegemony—including the “ideas of the ruling class” noted by Marx—is not a complete and stable set of beliefs forcibly foisted upon the masses, but rather a fluid entity that is constantly being contested in various ways (e.g. Gramsci 1971: 60, 80, 182–84).7 Similarly, as Hall (1981) and others noted, popular culture—including music—is best seen not as something crudely imposed by the entertainment industries (as Adorno might argue), but instead as a site of ongoing negotiation and contestation, a ground on which transformations are worked. Hegemony, in this conception, must continually be adapted and won again, as it responds to various sorts of challenges, however contradictory in nature, from diverse social or artistic movements. This more flexible and subtle understanding of hegemony bears certain affinities with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (a “system of dispositions” [1977] that regiments conduct in everyday life), and also with the intangible yet all-­enveloping workings of power as explored by French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Perhaps the most influential study of music to come from British cultural studies was Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which explored how the 1970s punk movement constituted a semiotic subversion of dominant ideologies—a kind of “graffiti on a prison wall” (1979: 3)—not in the form of overt political action, but rather through an artful and ideologically subversive resignification of symbols, from swastikas and safety pins to rudimentary guitar chords. Another significant contribution of British cultural studies has been to extend Marxist concepts of hegemony and resistance to relate not only to dynamics of class, but also to gender, ethnicity, race, and other dimensions of power and identity. Several ethnomusicologists have found this approach valuable in their work on non-Western cultures and of ethnic minorities within the West itself. A representative example is Raúl Romero’s study of music culture in the Mantaro Valley of Peru (2001), where, for the last century, Wanka Indians and mestizos have cultivated a vigorous regional culture—including syncretic music forms—through which they can preserve local identity while resisting cultural domination by nearby Lima.

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Text Box 2.2  Relationships among Differing Traditions of Critical Research The Birmingham School’s application of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to gender and race was one of many examples in twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought in which scholars brought ideas from two or more traditions of critical research together to understand the relations among differing forms of power. While there have certainly been substantial tensions between Marxist and feminist thinkers, for example, there have also been rich connections between them (see, for example, Townshend 1996; Brown 2014). One particularly resonant meeting place of Marxism and feminism can be found in a movement called Italian autonomism, where writers such as ­Mariarosa Dalla Costa (2019) and Silvia Federici (1975, 2004) have showed the centrality of ­women’s ­non-waged domestic labor for the emergence and reproduction of capitalism, and illustrated how a society’s means of production shapes its dynamics of gender and sexuality. Likewise, a wide variety of thinkers both within and beyond the B ­ irmingham School have brought critical approaches to race into conversation with Marxism, ­exploring the political economy of racial orders and the racial foundations of capitalism and ­colonialism (e.g. Gilroy 1982, 1987; Robinson 1983; James 1992; B ­ lackburn 1997; Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002; Parry 2004; Hall 2018). Since the 1960s, cultural studies and post-colonial studies have served as key sites in which ­scholars have examined the interaction of multiple forms of domination, and the ­chapters in this volume by Sugarman and Mahon discuss cultural studies approaches to gender and race, respectively. As Manuel observed above, the interplay among different dimensions of power is most frequently referred to in contemporary academic discourse as “intersectionality,” a term coined by the black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Mahon’s chapter provides the primary discussion of Crenshaw’s work and intersectionality more broadly, but Sugarman explores this topic as well. Marxism and post-colonial studies are discussed in the chapter by ­Wallach and Clinton. —Harris M. Berger

The Mass Media and Mode of Cultural Production Many of the key themes of cultural studies—including neo-Marxist ideas of hegemony, resistance, and alienation—have been explored in complementary fashion in the field of media studies.8 Media studies scholars make a fundamental distinction between the corporate, centralized, capital-intensive “old media” and the decentralized, democratic, and participatory “new media,” which are more conducive to grassroots input and diversity. As modes of music production and dissemination, the “old media” were quintessentially represented by cinema, network television, and the vinyl record industry, which was dominated for decades by the “Big Five” multinationals. Cassettes were the first form of “new media” in music production, as cassette players, duplication machinery, and cassettes themselves are inexpensive and user-friendly. Cassette technology had a particularly dramatic effect in the developing world, enabling the emergence of innumerable grassroots, community-based record labels that marketed an unprecedented variety of music types for diverse audiences, including subaltern groups whose music had never enjoyed mass-media dissemination. As I explored in Cassette Culture (1993), the cassette’s impact was particularly dramatic in India, where a music industry previously dominated by a handful of Bombay-based producers and artists gave way in the 1980s to a lively scene in which hundreds of companies, large and

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small, came to produce an extraordinary variety of musics, including folk-pop fusions, for local and regional markets. The democratization of the music industry did not promote any progressive social mobilization or challenge the existing political hegemony in India, but it did revitalize diverse community and regional music cultures that had been on the defensive against the standardized, one-size-fits-all mass culture emanating from Bollywood studios. In South Asia and elsewhere, subsequent decades saw music distribution shift from cassettes to MP3 discs and VCDs (video compact discs), and subsequently to digital media with the spread of the Internet and “Web 2.0” media. With the easy availability of free downloaded music and streaming music services, with their inconsiderable royalty payments, musicians have increasingly reverted to a pre-industrial or early twentieth-century modus vivendi in which recordings serve primarily as promotional entities and profits are made only through live performances—or perhaps through various sorts of flexible gigs in the digital economy, such as composing or performing for advertisements. In much of the developing world, direct Internet access is not even necessary for participation in the file-­ sharing culture, as mobile phones and USB sticks come to constitute predominant media for the distribution and consumption of music. In the process, sales of physical recordings have evaporated, the brick-and-mortar stores that sold them have disappeared, and many music producers have gone bankrupt.9 The present chapter need not explore all the ramifications of such developments, though some pertain directly to Marxist themes. Many studies of digital music culture in the ­neoliberal era have examined the actors and forces that control the new mode of music production, as well as the new media’s potentials for hegemony and resistance. Some studies emphasize how the Internet has led to new forms of concentration and consolidation in the music industry (Krims 2003; Azenha 2006), while others show how it has constituted a vehicle for a wide variety of progressive, counter-hegemonic music idioms (e.g. Manabe 2017). In many ways, Internet mediation has transformed the dichotomous power relationship between producer and consumer, precipitating the emergence of “prosumers” who enact both roles, whether through amateur mashups or YouTube comments and playlists (see, e.g., Ayers 2006; Kot 2009). The digital revolution has also transformed the use and exchange value of recorded music, turning it into what Jeremy Wade Morris (2015) calls a “digital music commodity,” with its own distinctive forms of materiality, uses, and social meanings. The technological revolution has also enhanced the aforementioned sense in which the consuming audience itself has become a commodity, whose tastes—as reflected, for example, in YouTube views and music downloads—are tracked, surveyed, and marketed via sophisticated algorithms to corporate interests (even as downloaders fancy themselves to be bypassing the music industry; see, e.g., Taylor 2012).

Capitalism, Bourgeois Subjectivity, and Musical Form Over the decades, ethnomusicologists have often been intrigued by the notion that social structure can condition not only forms of musical patronage and ideology, but also the actual form of music itself—that is, that sound structure can recapitulate social structure. This idea has frequently been referred to as “homology theory” and has taken many forms.10 Alan Lomax’s project of “cantometrics” is one well-known articulation of homology theory. Lomax assembled a large mass of information about the musical styles and forms of social organization of cultural groups from around the world and attempted to find correlations among these data sets (1968). Although most ethnomusicologists have found this work deeply problematic, Lomax was certainly correct in noting, for example, how relatively egalitarian classless societies—such as the Central African BaAka—make

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music in characteristically “groupy” ways, with individual parts combining in a loosely collective composite.11 Thomas Turino (1993) noted similar patterns of loosely communal music making and composition among highland Andean Indians; in contrast, those Indians who had migrated to Lima developed more rationalized, hierarchic social sensibilities and formed much more regimented ensembles, with distinct leaders and composers and accordingly more smooth and homogeneous musical textures. Neither Lomax nor Turino used Marxist approaches per se, which are in any case more oriented toward the analysis of stratified societies with distinct social classes. However, a few scholars have used Marxist theory to note how the epochal transition from f­eudalism to capitalism in Europe precipitated a new bourgeois aesthetic with, in music, a preference for closed, tightly structured forms—especially sonata form and “song”—with a clear sense of dramatic direction, climax, and closure. Such closed, symmetrical forms have been relatively uncharacteristic of traditional non-Western musics, or of music in the ­pre-Renaissance West. More typical of the latter are entities based on theme-and-variation, the ostinato (a repeating musical figure, often in the bass, against which various melodies are set), the strophe (where a group of thematically independent song texts are set to a single melody), or the rhythms of dance (in which various tunes may be strung together in no particular order or length). These all stand in dramatic contrast to the forms that came into vogue in Europe starting from the eighteenth century, especially sonata form, with its clear, if flexible, structure of exposition, development, and recapitulation. In popular and vernacular music, the parallel development was the emergence of 32-bar aaba (or often aababa) song form, which has dominated Euro-American popular music for more than a century, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, Beyoncé, and beyond. Marxist scholars have found a variety of ways to link the emergence of these highly structured forms to the changing economic base of European societies. Arnold Hauser argued that this new sensibility was rooted in the unprecedented importance of rationalization in socio-economic life attending the advent of capitalism. With the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the material foundation of European societies shifted from farming, hunting, and craft guilds—with their dependence on the vagaries of nature and the authority of ­t radition—to economies based on rational, man-made systems of planning, banking, credit, investment, and the like. Disorder, blind habit, and lack of control were anathema to the new sensibilities that came to govern commerce and extended to art as well. The things that came to be seen as beautiful involved the logical conformity of individual parts to the whole. The Italian Renaissance humanist Leone Alberti (1404–1472) was one of several thinkers who articulated this view explicitly, describing the proper work of art as “so constituted that it is impossible to take anything away from it or add anything to it without impairing the beauty of the whole” (Alberti in Hauser 1957: vol. 2, p. 89). This aesthetic came to govern all arts. The busy clutter typical of pre-Renaissance painting gave way to a unified, balanced structuring of the surface, using perspective to give the impression that the scene is being depicted from the vantage point of a single viewer. Similarly, pre-modern literary forms like the epic (such as Homer’s The Odyssey) or the bardic ballad would consist of a series of episodes which—aside from the opening and concluding chapters—occurred in no particular order and could be rearranged or shortened in performance. In the eighteenth century, such forms gave way to the novel, with its tightly knit, rationally structured form. There is an obvious parallel between this narrative structure and sonata form, in which the protagonistic first and second themes wander afar and eventually return home, and the disorder and tension introduced in the development section are logically resolved. In an impressive and original study (1974), Hungarian Marxist musicologist Janos ­Marothy traced the gradual evolution of song and sonata form and supplemented Hauser’s

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interpretation by positing a relation between such closed, structured entities and the new phenomenon of the “bourgeois Ego,” or what many scholars today would call the bourgeois subject. This new sort of personal identity, with its heightened self-awareness, was based on capitalism and the importance of the individual (or nuclear family) as productive unit, rather than the village, clan, or guild. Hence, literature, drama, and poetry came to focus on the infinitely nuanced emotional lives of ordinary people (as opposed to the stock heroic characters of epics and ballads, such as Ulysses or Roland). Paintings increasingly portrayed ordinary individuals, rather than traditional stereotypes and religious icons. Communal and line dances gave way—initially through the waltz—to intimate couple dances. And musical forms, in a more abstract but nevertheless tangible sense, acquired their own character as structured “individuals”—rather than loose, meandering, or additive entities—typically with their own internal dramatic sense of climax and closure, of foreground and background, and of “home” and the threatening/exciting outside world. Adorno (e.g. [1948] 1986: 55–56, especially as interpreted by Witkin 1998, and Subotnik 1976) offered his own complementary perspective on this aesthetic. In my own writing (1985, 2002), I have attempted to extend this analytical approach beyond the developed West, noting parallel sorts of historical transformations in Indian and Latin American musics, in which strophic, open-ended, or ostinato-based forms adopt symmetry and closure as they modernize and urbanize. Finally, postmodernist scholars inspired by Jameson and others could argue for a similar broad coherence between socio-economic structure and sound structure—such as much electronic dance music—conditioned by the arguably “epochal” transition to neoliberalism.

Conclusions Karl Marx may not have been thinking of world music when he wrote in 1852, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves” ([1852] 1959: 320). Nevertheless, most ethnomusicologists would agree that while men and women make their own music, and create their own styles, aesthetic ideas, and conventions of listening and performing, they do so in ways that are ultimately conditioned by broader historical contexts. Music, of course, does not merely “reflect” society and culture; its practices, events, aesthetics, and styles are often significant entities that themselves not only constitute parts of culture, but also can serve as focal sites for broader socio-cultural developments. And yet, these entities do not evolve in a socio-historical vacuum, but rather in the context of more fundamental material conditions. Marxists of various sorts have attempted to interpret these relationships, stressing the influence of socio-economic base on culture while allowing for certain sorts and degrees of autonomy in the superstructure. Over the years, ethnomusicologists have been interested in these same issues, and many have used Marxist approaches, especially as expanded and adapted by the field of cultural studies. While some Marxist theory—such as the work of Louis Althusser (see Sugarman, this volume)—has been criticized for a tendency to be excessively abstract, arid, and ahistorical, ethnomusicologists have made significant contributions in showing, more tangibly, how music may constitute a rich site for understanding the dynamics of hegemony and resistance, and the relations between social structure and sound structure. Further, in a modern Euro-American socio-political context in which bourgeois ideology and the mass media often actively obscure class ­consciousness—­especially ­working-class solidarity—Marxist approaches to culture can offer particularly unique insights. The contemporary student of ethnomusicology who takes the time to engage Marx’s seminal writings and those other scholars in this tradition will find them to be a rich source of insight.

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Notes 1 A number of the themes that Manuel raises here are discussed further in the chapter by Jeremy ­Wallach and Esther Clinton, where they are set in the context of globalization. These include the literature on alternative modernities, globalization and colonialism, globalization and neoliberalism, and the role of new media technology in the global spread of music. —Harris M. Berger 2 Oddly, Bourdieu himself endorsed this elitism by dismissing the idea that working-class people could have their own sort of aesthetics or art forms, saying that the expressive forms of the proletariat could consist of no more than “scattered fragments of an old erudite culture” (1984: 395). 3 Qureshi’s interest in Marxism is part of a larger school of Marxist studies at the University of Alberta, where she has been based (see, for example, Qureshi 2002a). 4 As explored by Jameson (1984), postmodern bricolage and pastiche typically combine entities from disparate media, such as cartoons and photographs, calling attention to their artificiality; blank irony mocks something without assuming a stance of normality and righteousness. A simulacrum—­ especially as described by Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1988)—is a media entity (such as an obviously doctored photograph), which does not signify or represent any real-world entity. 5 A contrasting view of the relationship between heavy metal music and capitalism is found in Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil. Where Berger focuses on a single working-class music scene and understands metal as expressing specifically proletarian frustrations, Walser looks at the genre of metal as a whole and understands it as articulating the cross-class experience of terror and exhilaration that emerge for anyone living under the relentlessly competitive conditions of late capitalism (1993: 165–71). 6 In the present intellectual scene, scholarly readings of Adorno’s work vary widely; on the contemporary reception of Adorno, see the remarks by Berger in Wallach and Clinton (this volume, n19). On Adorno’s influence on early ethnomusicological studies of the world music industry, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume). 7 Gramsci’s insights were presaged by Marx’s own observations that the force of capital, in all its ­d imensions, “moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited” ([1939] 1973: 410). 8 A useful survey is McQuail (1987). 9 For a rich social history of the decline of brick-and-mortar music retail in India, see Beaster-Jones (2016). 10 On homology theory in structuralism, see Beaster-Jones (this volume). On homology theory and theories of participation, see Rahaim (this volume). On homology theory in first-generation ­Birmingham School culture studies, as well as Dick Hebdidge’s attempt to replace it with the idea of “signifying practices” developed by Julia Kristeva and other thinkers from the Tel Quel group, see ­Hebdige (1979: 117–27). 11 While Lomax’s schematic attempts to link cultural traits and musical style are generally seen as crude and mechanistic, his approach has resurfaced, for better or worse, in such work as the “Natural History of Song” project (Natural History, n.d.).

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. (1948) 1986. Philosophy of Modern Music. New York: Continuum. ———. (1962) 1988. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Continuum. ———. 1998. “On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening.” In The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, 270–99. New York: Continuum. ———. 2005. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by Raiford A. Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz, 103–08. Los Angeles: Sage Publications Ltd. Allen, Matthew. 1997. “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance.” TDR 41: 63–100. ———. 2008. “Systematize, Standardize, Classicize: The ‘Scientific’ Work of the Experts’ Committee of the Music Academy of Madras, ca. 1930–1952.” In Performing Pasts: Reinventing the Arts in Modern South India, edited by Indira Vishwanathan Peterson and Davesh Soneji. New York: Oxford University Press. Ayers, Michael D., ed. 2006. Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture. New York: Peter Lang Press. Azenha, Gustavo S. 2006. “The Internet and the Decentralisation of the Popular Music Industry: Critical Reflections on Technology, Concentration, and Diversification.” Radical Musicology 1. http://www. radical-musicology.org.uk/2006/Azenha.htm.

Marxist Approaches  67 Bakhle, Janaki. 2005. Two Men and Music: Nationalism and the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press. Bartolovich, Crystal, and Neil Lazarus, eds. 2002. Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. (1981) 1988. “Simulacra and Simulation.” In Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster, 166–84. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beaster-Jones, Jayson. 2016. Music Commodities, Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise. New York: Routledge. Berger, Harris. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. Music/ Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2010. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Music/ Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Berger, Harris M., and Giovanna P. Del Negro. 2016. “Reasonable Suspicions: Practice Theory and the Political Life of Institutional Folklore.” Cultural Analysis 15 (1). https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cultural analysis/volume15/vol15_berger_del_negro.html. Blackburn, Robin. 1997. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. London: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. (1980) 1990. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ­ ambridge, ———. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. C MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Translated by Richard Nice. New York: Free Press. ———. 2003. Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2. Translated by Loïc Wacquant. New York: Free Press. Bronner, Simon J. 2012. “Practice Theory in Folklore and Folklife Studies.” Folklore 123 (1): 23–47. Brown, Heather. 2014. “Marx on Gender and the Family: A Summary.” Monthly Review 66 (2). https:// monthlyreview.org/2014/06/01/marx-on-gender-and-the-family-a-summary/. Buccitelli, Anthony Bak, and Casey R. Schmitt. 2016. “Everyday Practice and Tradition: New Directions for Practice Theory in Ethnology and Folkloristics.” Cultural Analysis 15 (1). https://www.ocf.berkeley. edu/~culturalanalysis/volume15/vol15_introduction.html. Buxton, David. (1983) 1990. “Rock Music, the Star System, and the Rise of Consumerism.” In On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word, edited by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, 427–40. New York: Pantheon. Coplan, David. 1982. “The Urbanisation of African Music: Some Theoretical Observations.” Popular Music 2: 113–30. ———. 1985. In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre. New York: Longman. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist ­Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum. 140: 139–67. Dalla Costa, Mariarosa. 2019. Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader. Edited by Camille Barbagallo. Oakland, CA: PM Press. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: ­University of California Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1976. Marxism and Literary Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (1983) 2008. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and John Ehrenreich. 1979. “The Professional-Managerial Class.” In Between Labor and Capital: The Professional-Managerial Class, edited by Pat Walker, 5–48. Boston: South End Press. Erlmann, Veit. 1991. African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance. Chicago: University of ­Chicago Press. Federici, Silvia. 1975. Wages Against Housework. Bristol: Power of Women Collective and Falling Water Press. ———. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

68  Peter Manuel Feld, Steven. 1988. “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over-Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli Groove.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20: 74–113. Fox, Aaron. 2004. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Giddens, Anthony. (1976) 1993. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretive Sociologies. 2nd ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. ­Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of ­California Press. ———. 1994. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1998. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1987. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, ed. 1982. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by R. Samuel, 227–40. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 2018. Essential Essays. Edited by David Morley. 2 vol. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. ­Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hauser, Arnold. (1951) 1957. The Social History of Art. 4 vol. New York: Vintage. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge. James, C. L. R. 1992. The C.L.R. James Reader. Edited by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Blackwell. Jameson, Fredrick. 1984. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146( July/Aug): 53–92. Kaplan, E. Ann. 1987. Rockin’ Round the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen. Kahn-Harris, Keith. 2006. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. New York: Berg. Keil, Charles. 1994. “People’s Music Comparatively: Style and Stereotype, Class and Hegemony.” In ­Music Grooves, by Charles Keil and Steven Feld, 197–217. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kot, Greg. 2009. Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music. New York: Scribner. Krims, Adam. 2003. “Marxist Music Analysis without Adorno: Popular Music and Urban Geography.” In Analyzing Popular Music, edited by Allan F. Moore, 131–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. León, Javier. 2014. “Introduction: Music, Music Making, and Neoliberalism.” Culture, Theory and ­Critique 55 (2): 129–137. Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. Mahon, Maureen. 2004. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manabe, Noriko. 2016. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music after Fukushima. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. “The Unending History of Protest Music.” Music and Politics 11 (1). http://quod.lib.umich. edu/m/mp/9460447.0011.102/--responses-to-peter-manuels-world-music-and-activism-since?rgn=main;view=fulltext. Manuel, Peter. 1985. “Formal Structure in Popular Music as a Reflection of Socio-Economic Economic Change.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 16 (2): 163–80. ———. 1988. Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1989. Thumri in Historical and Stylistic Perspectives. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. ———. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. “Music as Symbol, Music as Simulacrum: Pre-Modern, Modern, and Postmodern Aesthetics in Subcultural Musics.” Popular Music 14 (2): 227–239.

Marxist Approaches  69 ———. 2002. “Modernity and Music Structure: Neo-Marxist Perspectives on Song Form and its Successors.” In Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, edited by Regula Qureshi, 45–62. New York: Routledge. Marothy, Janos. 1974. Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletarian. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Marx, Karl. (1852) 2005. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by D.D.L. London: Mondial. ———. (1859) 1959. “Excerpt from ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.’” In Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis Feuer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ———. 1867. Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Capital: A critique of political economy). ­Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner. ———. (1939) 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin ­Nichola. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1846. A Critique of the German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_The_German_Ideology.pdf. ———. (1848) 1959. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In Marx & Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, edited by Lewis Feuer. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. McDonald, David. 2013a. My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2013b. Palestinian Music and Song: Expression and Resistance since 1900. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McQuail, Denis. 1987. Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction. London: Sage. Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Morris, Jeremy Wade. 2015. Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Natural History of Song Project. n.d. The Natural History of Song: A Systematic Investigation of the World’s Vocal Music. Accessed August 29, 2017. https://www.naturalhistoryofsong.org. Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–66. ———. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Paddison, Max. 1982. “The Critique Criticized: Adorno and Popular Music.” Popular Music 2: 201–18. Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge. Peña, Manuel. 1985. The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music. Austin: University of Texas Press. Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt. 2000. “Confronting the Social: Mode of Production and the Sublime for (Indian) Art Music.” Ethnomusicology 44 (1): 39–65. ———, ed. 2002a. Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002b. “Mode of Production and Musical Production: Is Hindustani Music Feudal?” In Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, edited by Regula Qureshi, 81–105. New York: Routledge. Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Romero, Raúl. 2001. Debating the Past: Music, Memory, and Identity in the Andes. New York: Oxford ­University Press. Rouse, Joseph. 2007. “Practice Theory.” In Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 15: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord, 639–682. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Schatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds. 2001. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. New York: Routledge. Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suyá Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steingo, Gavin. 2016. “Musical Economies of the Elusive Metropolis.” In Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan, 246–66. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stokes, Martin. 2002. “Marx, Money, and Musicians.” In Music and Marx: Ideas, Practice, Politics, edited by Regula Qureshi, 139–63. New York: Routledge. Stone, Ruth. 1982. Let the Inside Be Sweet: The Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of Liberia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

70  Peter Manuel Straw, Will. 1988. “Music Video in its Contexts: Popular Music and Post-modernism in the 1980s.” Popular Music 7 (3): 247–66. Subotnik, Rose. 1976. “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptoms of a Fatal Condition.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 29 (2): 242–75. Subramanian, Lakshmi. 2006. From the Tanjore Court to the Madras Music Academy: A Social History of Music in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sugarman, Jane C. 1997. Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Timothy. 2012. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Townshend, Jules. 1996. The Politics of Marxism: The Critical Debates. London: Leicester University Press. Turino, Thomas. 1993. Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walser, Robert. 1993. Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. ­M iddletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Williams, Raymond. (1973) 1980. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture, 31–63. London: Verso. Witkin, Robert. 1998. Adorno on Music. New York: Routledge.

3 Theories of Gender and Sexuality From the Village to the Anthropocene Jane C. Sugarman

It was in the 1980s that the topic of gender was first given concerted attention in North American ethnomusicology, prompted initially by the recognition of specific imbalances in the discipline. For example, in The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (1983), Bruno Nettl noted that, despite a high percentage of women scholars in the field, most studies “described music cultures largely as they were presented by male informants,” a fact he attributed in part to the “dominant role of men in determining approaches and methods” in the discipline (334). Indeed, it could be argued that, because of the prominence of male academics in the field’s early years, women scholars had generally been trained by male mentors (or their female students), and in many cases, modeled their methodologies and choice of study objects on those of their teachers. Further, in many societies, men were the principal performers of music in public settings and were thus often more accessible to researchers, male or female. But the problem ran deeper: many ethnomusicologists drew on theoretical models from the social sciences, and these too had a male bias, as many anthropologists at the time had begun to argue (Reiter 1975). As a result, the view of music that emerged in ethnomusicology scholarship, and that was taught both to general students and to future generations of specialists in the field, was an androcentric one. In the 1980s, a group of primarily female ethnomusicologists began to turn their attention to the musical activities and perspectives of women, often within an explicitly feminist framework. Gradually, such scholarship shifted from an emphasis on “women and music” to a consideration of “music and gender” and, more recently, to issues of sexuality as well. This chapter traces that intellectual trajectory by reviewing some of the ways in which relationships among music, gender, and sexuality have been analyzed in ethnomusicology and related disciplines.1 I discuss several major theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality that ethnomusicologists have used, beginning with the feminist anthropology of the 1970s and 1980s and continuing with poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, gender performativity and queer theory, interventions in Western feminism by scholars of color (including the concept of intersectionality), theories of masculinities, and writings interrogating the concept of resistance with regard to gender norms. This overview is followed by a discussion of several significant music studies that have drawn on these and other theoretical writings, and then a brief case study drawn from my own research. The chapter closes with a look ahead toward theoretical formulations that are on the horizon.

Activism and the Academy At the outset of this chapter, it is important to be aware of the complex relationships that exist between, on the one hand, feminist and LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) activism and, on the other hand, research on gender and sexuality, as well as the many forms that the politics of gender and sexuality has taken in differing national contexts. Within the Western academy, scholars often distinguish between feminism and LGBT

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rights as political movements and the academic fields of women’s studies, feminist studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, these political movements have not been confined to Western democracies but have unfolded in various forms around the world. The issue of gender equality, in particular, has at times been aligned with nation-building efforts or national liberation movements. It is not only popular and mass activism that has played a role in the politics of gender and sexuality: throughout the twentieth century, policies regulating gender relations and sexual behaviors have been an intrinsic part of most state legal systems. In these contexts, it is important to acknowledge the differences between Western social movements and the diverse forms of activism and governmentality that have developed around the world.2 With regard to feminism, scholars in Western countries frequently speak of three “waves” of intensive feminist engagement, most often expressed in a language of rights. The first wave is said to encompass the period roughly from the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. At this time, feminists were primarily concerned with women’s legal rights, including the right to own and inherit property and to vote (which was called “suffrage” during this period). The second wave of intensive activities is said to have begun in the early 1960s and continued into the 1980s. Activism in the US in this period was spearheaded by women who were attending college or had received a college degree, and is often interpreted as a reaction against the expectations placed on women after World War II that they forsake the employment they had undertaken during the war and return to the domestic sphere and the role of housewife. The major concerns of this wave included achieving “equal pay for equal work,” reproductive rights, and equal access to professional opportunities, as well as phenomena such as domestic violence and workplace harassment. Thirdwave feminism is the term generally attributed to political stances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which greater attention has been given to issues of sexuality and gender fluidity, as well as the intersection of gender with other aspects of identity such as race, class, and ability. The notion of waves has itself been widely criticized, particularly for ignoring the activities of working-class women and women of color.3 LGBT rights movements in Western countries have followed a similar trajectory. Unlike women’s movements, however, individuals identifying with any of these categories have campaigned not only for legal, economic, and social parity, but also for the decriminalization and demedicalization of their sexual activities. There has also been ongoing debate within and beyond these movements as to how individuals should best identify themselves. Throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, there was a general trend in North Atlantic countries to criminalize what only became known as “homosexuality” in the mid-nineteenth century, in a period that also marked the beginnings of medical and psychiatric research into sexual behaviors. In the US, although subcultures based on a “gay” or “lesbian” identity developed in individual locales in the early twentieth century, it was not until the 1950s that the first successful organizations campaigning for gay and lesbian rights were founded. Political activism increased throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and by the early 1970s a “gay (and lesbian) liberation” movement began to consolidate across the US, modeled in part on—and at times intersecting with—the civil rights and women’s movements. Gradually, gays and lesbians were joined by individuals who identified as bisexual or transsexual (later, transgender), bringing into being the acronym LGBT. By the late 1980s, the term “queer” began to be advocated by activists in the US who were uncomfortable with the essentialization of identities that was being emphasized within this movement. Others adopted the term in opposition to a shift in activism toward goals such as same-sex marriage or service in the military, which were seen as conservative and assimilationist. Most recently, the term “queer” has been incorporated into longer acronyms such as LGBTQIA2 (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer

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[or  questioning]-intersex-asexual-two spirited) in an attempt to encompass all forms of non-heteronormative self-identification.4 The relationship among these diverse forms of activism and between social movements and the Western academy is highly complex. For example, as a result of the feminist agitation of the previous decade, the early 1970s saw the founding of the first academic programs in women’s studies in the US, in a period when programs in ethnic studies were also emerging. Members of the black feminist Combahee River Collective ([1977] 1979) were among the first to propose the term “identity politics” to refer to activism in this period that foregrounded social inequities on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of identification.5 Such writings anticipated the development of both intersectional and critical race theory beginning in the later 1980s (see below). Beginning in the late 1970s, scholars in Western Europe began to group women’s, civil rights, and gay rights (later LGBT) movements together with environmentalism, peace movements, and anti-­g lobalization activism as “the new social movements” (Buechler 1995; see also Laclau and Mouffe ([1985] 2014). In this same period, scholars associated with British cultural studies began to highlight race and gender, in addition to class, in their politically engaged writings. More recently, in response to LGBT activism, many women’s studies programs have expanded their scope to encompass gender and sexuality studies. In both Europe and the US, much of this scholarship has been prompted by a recognition that all such forms of activism challenge the central place that class held in earlier struggles and are less amenable to some forms of Marxist analysis. In turn, feminism and LGBT activism in recent decades have been strongly influenced by academic theorizing, several strains of which are discussed below.

Women’s Studies and Feminist Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s During the early 1970s, as women’s studies was beginning to be recognized as an academic field of study in the US, much of the scholarship in disciplines such as English literature, sociology, and psychology focused on Western societies, and specifically on the situation and experiences of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Among the topics addressed were the character of Western family structures, the “sex roles” that defined Western societies, and the identification of “traits” that were inherent to each sex. Gradually scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences began to move away from an exclusive focus on “sex” to the recognition of a distinction between “sex” and “gender.”6 As these terms have come to be used, “sex” refers to chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical ­characteristics, which together are taken to distinguish males and females. “Gender” refers to societal beliefs about the sexes, such as how members of each sex are expected to behave or what characteristics they are believed to have, as well as how individuals choose to identify themselves. Sex is seen to be universal and fundamental, while gender is societally specific. It is important to note that, although such a distinction is still widely observed, it has been criticized over the decades from a variety of perspectives. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist and feminist scholar who has researched “intersex” individuals whose bodies are not readily classified as male or female, has suggested that a “sexual continuum” exists, with male and female “on the extreme ends” (2000: 31). When scientists or medical professionals identify an individual as male or female, their decision is ultimately made on the basis of social consensus (3). Fausto-Sterling has argued further that Euro-American scientific research, which earlier recognized various configurations of sex characteristics, came to distinguish more rigidly between categories of male and female during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period that coincided with increased agitation for gender equality (39–40). More recently, writers associated with the “new materialism” (see below) have argued that,

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by emphasizing a split between sex/nature and gender/nurture, the sex-gender distinction constructs the biological and the cultural as discrete domains that interact, rather than as “a differentiation within one system, where the differentiated parts are entangled such that they cannot be distinctly and separately identified” (Davis 2009: 76). Parallel with other early developments in women’s studies, a field of feminist anthropology began to coalesce in the 1970s, composed largely but not exclusively of women scholars (see, for example, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Reiter 1975; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Moore 1988). In contrast to scholars in other disciplines, feminist anthropologists attempted to create an approach to the study of gender that could be applied cross-culturally. Much early literature in this area focused on issues of male dominance: Were all societies patriarchal? Were women universally oppressed or subordinated? Were there any societies that were matriarchal or completely egalitarian? A concern with such issues meant that Western feminist scholars had to weigh their political ideals, formulated within the context of their own society, against their need to be sensitive to the specificity of the societies that they were examining. This tension led to difficult questions. On the one hand, did giving precedence to the “native’s point of view” (cf. Geertz 1983), which was highly valued among many anthropologists at the time, privilege the perspective of those with greatest status and authority? Did males and females even share a common viewpoint? On the other hand, did a focus on power relations involve imposing constructs that were insensitive to the local context? Did such a focus recapitulate discourses that constructed non-Western societies as “backward” in comparison to the West (Mohanty 1988; see also Mohanty 2002)? Such considerations continue to challenge any researcher of gender and sexuality (Monson 1997). With few exceptions, anthropologists of this period assumed that a society’s “sex/gender system” (Rubin 1975) or “gender ideology” (Ortner and Whitehead 1981) was characterized by only two genders and heterosexual sexuality. Consistent with anthropological practices of the time, most researchers also based their analyses on intensive, face-to-face fieldwork within small communities, rather than considering urban populations, the politics of the nation-state, or transnational processes. Only gradually have researchers “scaled up” to address larger geopolitical units or other forms of gendered and sexual identification. In the early 1970s, a number of feminist anthropologists began to use the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss to develop a structuralist approach to what was still regarded as sexual difference (on Lévi-Strauss, see Beaster-Jones, this volume). For example, in her article “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Sherry Ortner (1974) drew on Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked (1969) to argue that females were universally regarded as being “closer ­ évi-Strauss to nature,” while males were aligned with the domain of “culture,” by which L referred to the various actions that humans perform on the natural environment. For scholars of music, such an analysis held the promise of explaining the musical roles that each gender plays in various societies—why females are frequently encharged with songs that mark important points in the life cycle, and why males are most often the principal builders and players of instruments, as well as the creators and performers of the most valued musical genres. Ultimately, however, two factors suggested that a different approach to the study of gender was needed. First was the realization that categories such as “nature” and “culture”—as well as a framework within which they are viewed as binary opposites—are not universally recognized (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). Second, ethnographic research revealed countless exceptions to these generalizations. In some societies, both males and females perform life-cycle genres, adult women may be prominent public performers or esteemed ritual specialists, and individuals not clearly defined as male or female may be encharged with important musical roles.7 By the 1980s, many anthropologists of gender had come to replace structuralist approaches with the framework of “symbolic” or “interpretive” anthropology advanced

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by Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) and others. (On Geertz and ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone, Introduction, this volume; on Geertz and performance studies, see Waterman, this volume.) Rather than taking a universalist approach to signs and symbolism, Geertz treated individual cultures as distinct systems of signs, each with its own unique set of meanings (1973, 1983). In this context, the ethnographer studied a society by investigating and synthesizing the meanings behind its members’ linguistic categories and its characteristic forms of behavior. At the time, one rival school of anthropological thought emphasized the close observation of behavior as its principal research method (Harris 1979). Because he wished to emphasize the meanings underlying and informing behavior, Geertz termed his method “thick description” (Geertz 1973: 3–30), in the sense that it added a second layer of analysis to that of behavior alone. Scholars working within a Geertzian framework approached their task not in terms of sex as a biological given, but rather in terms of gender as one component of a society’s larger symbolic system. Instead of assuming from the outset, for example, that females were aligned with nature and males with culture, it was necessary to investigate how a society’s members spoke about gender relations, which attributes and practices they associated with each gender category, what sorts of explanations they gave (or could be deduced) for those associations, and how those associations related to other domains of conceptualization and action. In the course of such research, anthropologists began to note a variety of behaviors and forms of identification that could not be understood within a binary, heteronormative framework. They thus began to give explicit attention to individuals who identified with gender categories other than male and female (“third gender”), who identified sexually in non-heteronormative ways, or who transitioned from one gender to another (Herdt 1994). Clearly, it was not just gender characteristics that were socially constructed but the full configuration of genders and sexualities within any given society.8 In an attempt to integrate such analyses with materialist approaches, some scholars argued that gender relations should not be viewed as deriving from more “fundamental” aspects of society, such as economic or political organization, but as interacting with those dimensions as “mutually determining aspects of a complex social whole” (Collier and Rosaldo 1981: 279). If anthropology is the study of culture and society, feminist scholarship challenged how those phenomena were to be analyzed and suggested that a consideration of gender should be intrinsic to all forms of analysis. Such a stance necessitated an appraisal of how gender and sexuality were implicated in the larger realm of power relations that characterized any given society.

French Poststructuralism The emphasis on power relations that emerged in the anthropology of the 1980s was prompted in large part by the increasing influence of two major bodies of theory (see ­Ortner 1984). The first was Marxism—not only the writings of Marx and Engels themselves, but also the work of Antonio Gramsci, Immanuel Wallerstein, and the British literary critic Raymond Williams. (On Gramsci, Marxism, and cultural studies in ethnomusicology, see also the chapters by Manuel and Mahon in this volume.) Second were several strains of theoretical literature that emerged in France in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, this work is often referred to as poststructuralism, although this term was not used by these authors themselves. Less a unified school of thought than a diverse group of thinkers, many of whom studied at or were associated with the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, French poststructuralists addressed a common set of issues and, at times, made similar claims. Together with British cultural studies theorists such as Williams and Stuart Hall (e.g. 1986), their work bears witness to a growing interest among many Western European scholars in

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issues raised by Gramsci’s writings, which drew attention to roles that cultural forms might play in societal reproduction, contestation, and transformation. In this chapter, I will discuss three scholars whose theories have been applied most directly to the analysis of gender and sexuality. It must be emphasized, however, that poststructuralism represents a major shift in Western thought and has had an enormous influence on a wide range of academic disciplines. As I explain below, poststructuralists developed radically new perspectives on the notion of the subject and challenged many aspects of Western humanist and Enlightenment thought regarding agency and the self.9 Their writings have thus been crucial to recent scholarship that theorizes any process of social identification (e.g. Hall and Du Gay 1996). More specifically, their attention to the role of bodily practices in such processes has spurred much of the literature on embodiment and performance (see Text Box 1.1 and Waterman, this volume). By emphasizing the role of social practices and institutions in the production of knowledge and claims to truth, they have also contributed to the foregrounding of issues of representation, seen most prominently in the field of post-colonial studies (see Wallach and Clinton, this volume), but also in studies of race. In anthropology, many scholars have abandoned the notion of a homogeneous culture for a poststructuralist emphasis on discourses and practices.10 Fundamental to poststructuralism is a new notion of the subject, as advanced initially by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990). In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)” ([1968] 1971), Althusser attempted to identify the processes through which, in Marxist terms, a society’s “ruling ideology” is reproduced from one generation to the next. Drawing on Gramsci’s distinction between “state” and “civil society,” Althusser argued that the reproduction of power relations primarily occurs, not through the repressive organs of the state such as the police or the military, but rather through civic institutions such as the family, the media, religious organizations, and the educational system. He termed these institutions “Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs). ­A lthusser’s major theoretical contribution was to argue that individuals should not be regarded as voluntarist subjects who encounter their society’s ideology as something external to themselves. Rather, individuals are “always already” constituted as subjects within that ideology (172–73), which is then constantly reinscribed in them as they engage in the practices that are characteristic of each ISA. He referred to the process through which individuals are thus “subjected” to ideology—in the sense of being formed as subjects—as “interpellation.” Althusser’s concept of interpellation can be helpful to scholars of gender to explain how, and in which domains, individuals come to internalize their society’s views of gender relations and to experience themselves as belonging to one of the dominant gender categories (in Western societies, heterosexual males or females). It has been left to other scholars, however, to theorize how his ideas might be applied to individuals who experience themselves as belonging to subordinate or minoritarian categories (see below). A second theorist who was concerned with social reproduction was the ethnographer and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). Bourdieu presented an early formulation of his theoretical framework in Outline of a Theory of Practice ([1972] 1977), which drew on ethnographic fieldwork he conducted in Kabyle Berber communities in Algeria.11 Rather than conceptualizing a subject within ideology, as Althusser had, Bourdieu developed his own version of Aristotle’s concept of “habitus,” by which he meant the individual’s internalization of the defining structures of her or his society. Like Althusser, Bourdieu gave particular attention to the role of social practices in the constitution of subjectivity. In his view, an individual’s acquisition of a “habitus” takes place through a process that he referred to as a “dialectic of objectification and embodiment” (87 ff ). In the embodiment phase of the dialectic, individuals gain a mastery of the basic organizational features of their society as they engage in aspects of behavior such as posture and gesture, dress, manner

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of speech, and movement through space. At the same time, their actions are objectified, in the sense of being made tangible to others. This objectification, in turn, contributes to the ongoing formulation of the habitus of all those who perceive their actions. Bourdieu emphasized the non-discursive dimension of such processes, distinguishing the knowledge that an individual acquires non-verbally (which he referred to as “practical mastery”) from that acquired through verbal means (“symbolic mastery”). Since much of what an individual understands about society exists in the form of “practical consciousness,” it is often not examined through verbal means and is thus naturalized and regarded as self-evident, a state that Bourdieu referred to as “doxa” (164). Because an individual’s habitus is formed from that person’s specific experiences, it is different from the anthropological notion of a shared “culture,” in that it is unique in its content. Nevertheless, Bourdieu argued, because the habitus of individuals within a community are formed through many similar experiences and thus contain many common elements, the actions of community members are inevitably “orchestrated” (80), in the sense of being consistent and predictable, albeit to varying degrees. Many of Bourdieu’s examples in the Outline relate to gender, which he saw as fundamental to both the division of labor in Kabyle society and to individual differences in habitus. In line with his overall approach, Bourdieu’s analysis implies that the gendered aspects of habitus are naturalized for Kabyle because they have been acquired largely through unspoken, practical means. Gender identification is thus an embodied practice, a stance that renders his approach particularly suitable for studies of performance. The doxic quality of many aspects of gender relations can also help to explain how one’s gendered behavior may be at odds with one’s conscious understanding of gender ideals. Many years after the Outline, Bourdieu elaborated on his ideas on gender in Masculine Domination ([1998] 2001). The French theorist who has had the greatest impact on studies of gender and sexuality is philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Rather than researching contemporary societies, Foucault’s major project was writing what he referred to as a “history of the present” ([1975] 1979: 31)—an attempt to trace back through the centuries the development of concepts, practices, and institutions that characterize post-medieval Western societies. He referred to his methodology variously as “archeology” ([1969] 1972) and “genealogy” (1984). Most of Foucault’s monographs are case studies that focus on a particular aspect of society and that may be seen to operate on two levels: one pertaining to the particular phenomena addressed in the study, and the other contributing to his ongoing formulation of a more general theoretical framework. Two of Foucault’s case studies have been particularly influential for research on gender and sexuality. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ([1975] 1979), Foucault traced the transition in Western societies’ treatment of behavior labeled as “criminal” from corporeal punishment to imprisonment. For Foucault, the techniques of the prison became the template for the disciplining and surveillance of the body—techniques that were later introduced to other institutions, such as the military, the school, the hospital, and the factory. Producing what Foucault referred to as “docile bodies,” these techniques became the defining features of Western societies. Foucault portrayed the modern state as exerting power over its citizens not, primarily, by passing restrictive laws but by subjecting individuals to practices that simultaneously discipline them and produce scientific knowledge about them (192). Through such processes, individuals are constituted as particular categories of subjects within the logic of a political order, which individuals then experience as real and true: The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline.’ We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in

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negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces: it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production. (1979: 194) Discipline and Punish can be read as elaborating on the views of Althusser, with whom Foucault studied, in that it details the role of specific institutions and social practices in constituting individuals as subjects (see especially Foucault 1982). However, rather than seeing power as encapsulated within ideology, as Althusser had, Foucault conceived of power as exerted through a multitude of “technologies” (bodily practices and techniques) that pervade society. His notion of the disciplined body is also similar to Bourdieu’s habitus. But whereas Bourdieu regarded the formation of habitus as a given process within any society, Foucault focused, in a highly critical way, on forms of bodily disciplining that he regarded as specific to the modern West.12 Foucault’s interest in the character of power and its relationship to both knowledge and bodily practice was further developed in The History of Sexuality: Volume I, An Introduction ([1976] 1980). Here Foucault shifted his emphasis to “discourses”: authoritative ways of speaking (and by extension writing) whose aim is to produce knowledge about a specific domain and thus to make truth claims about it (see also Foucault [1969] 1972). In Foucault’s view, discourses do not describe a pre-existing reality but rather “form the objects of which they speak” ([1969] 1972: 49): that is, they both define the terms of what members of a society experience as reality and constitute the categories to which individuals are, in Althusserian terms, interpellated. Foucault’s approach to discourse broke decidedly with two major intellectual practices. First, rather than approaching language as a system of signs, as in structural linguistics (see Beaster-Jones, this volume), Foucault emphasized its productivity: the capacity of language to exert power and constitute reality. Second, rather than focusing on the intentions of those who contribute to the development of discourses, he emphasized the ongoing effect that discourses have upon the societies in which they circulate. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 traces a “genealogy” of Western discourses regarding sexuality, beginning with the Roman Catholic practice of confession and continuing through the development of myriad medical and psychological or psychiatric formulations (including the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and others). Through the deployment of such discourses, individuals in particular historical periods have been constituted as specific types of sexualized subjects, such as the “hysterical woman” or the sexual “pervert.” At the same time, such categories have established what has been considered to be known and true. Discourses have thus defined the terms of any state’s regulatory regimes, such as those examined in Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, discourses of sexuality are among those that have come to exert power in modern societies through legal systems and a range of practices that define what counts as the “norm” and, by contrast, what may be viewed as “abnormal” or “deviant.” Power and knowledge are thus inseparable, a concept that he captured with the construct “power/knowledge.”13 For Foucault, power does not reside in the discourse itself but rather is exerted through a discourse’s deployment. This idea is illustrated through the category of the “homosexual,” which first developed in Western Europe in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the deployment of a medical discourse of homosexuality constituted certain individuals as homosexuals, thus claiming a truth about them and enabling them to be regulated by the state. On the other hand, individuals so constituted came to deploy a “reverse discourse” in which they advocated for themselves in the name of the category to which they had been interpellated. In this way, discourse can be used as a form of resistance but only in relation

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to its deployment as a means of social control (1980: 101; see also Foucault 1982). Thus, while power inevitably produces resistance, resistance can also have the effect of reinscribing power.

Gender Performativity and Queer Theory When they were first introduced to Anglophone readers, Foucault’s ideas, and those of French poststructuralists more generally, posed major challenges to the feminist theories and political strategies of the period. These ideas entered the academy at a time when women, as well as sexual and ethnic/racial minorities, were consolidating themselves politically within Western democracies and demanding a voice in the public sphere. In this context, Foucault’s theories could be read as suggesting that the gender, sexual, and racial categories that had developed in the modern West were not real but rather were constructed through specific discourses and practices. How could one act politically as a “woman” when “woman” was merely a construct? How could resistance be effective if it merely reinscribed existing power relations? And if power was something exerted through countless micro-processes, rather than residing in specific societal structures, how could one speak meaningfully of notions such as “male domination” and “patriarchy”? More generally, the challenge that poststructuralist theories posed to the Enlightenment notion of the voluntarist subject made it difficult to conceive of oneself as an actor consciously exerting one’s agency, either in the academy or in politics. How could one escape the ideology into which one was interpellated or the technologies of power/knowledge that constituted one within a particular regime of truth?14 Despite these problems, many scholars saw in poststructuralism a way to reconceptualize gender and sexuality that might avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier formulations, leading to new approaches in feminist as well as queer theory. Principal among these was philosopher Judith Butler (b. 1956), who emerged in the 1990s as the most influential Anglophone theorist of gender and sexuality. In her early writings (1990, 1991, 1993, 1996), Butler drew on a wide range of thinkers in order to formulate her approach, including Althusser, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, French feminist theorists Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig, psychoanalytic theorists Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and speech-act theorist J. L. Austin, among others. Rather than seeing gender as an expression of an underlying biological sex, Butler argued that gender as a form of subjectivity is “performed”: it is constituted through the repetition of actions that are taken—by oneself and others—to define the “norm” for one’s category of gender. Through such repetitive performances, “regulatory ideals” of gender are produced and sustained within particular societies. In characterizing gender as “performative,” Butler was not placing an emphasis on staged performance, but rather on an individual’s everyday actions, which are carried out largely outside conscious awareness. Thus: … gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express. It is a compulsory performance … (1991: 24) Butler argued further that, because repetition can never be exact, gender performance is never entirely consistent and that gendered subjectivities are thus inherently unstable. Despite her emphasis on everyday gender performance, Butler has become an important figure in the field of performance studies, where scholars have for many years examined the relationship between mundane and theatrical behavior (see Waterman, this volume).

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Although Butler did not formulate her approach in conjunction with Bourdieu’s writings, one can see her model of gendered subjectivity as similar to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, with two important differences. First, whereas Bourdieu’s primary concern was social reproduction, and thus the reinscription through time of relatively stable forms of subjectivity, Butler has seen in the incapacity of individuals to fully repeat their performances the possibility of effecting changes in gender norms through incremental variation. Second, whereas Bourdieu’s writings are premised on heteronormative gender categories, Butler has attended both to individuals who have been interpellated to such categories and to those who have not: those who experience themselves as “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” or “queer”; those who have been categorized as “intersex”; and those who have transitioned from one gender category to another (see especially Butler 2004). In her early writings (1990, 1991), she explored these possibilities in part through an interrogation and reworking of Freud’s concept of the “Oedipal complex” ([1923] 1960), a process through which, as Freud argued, most individuals come to desire one gender, either male or female, and identify with the other, thus normalizing heterosexuality. For Butler, not only is it possible to desire someone of the gender with which one identifies, but desire and identification may also be intertwined in complex ways in one’s self-presentation as well as in the roles that one plays in sexual relations. In addressing such issues, Butler has become a central figure not only in women’s studies and feminist theory, but also in queer theory. If, as Butler suggests, female and male genders are performed, then they need not be aligned with particular bodies nor with particular forms of sexual behavior. An individual’s performance need not consistently reinscribe a single gender, and an individual may transition from one gender to another. Understood in this way, gender identification is fluid rather than fixed, a process rather than a foreclosed status. These ideas have substantial consequences for Butler’s politics. Following Foucault, she has seen a danger in any politics that treats a stable gender category, such as “woman” or “lesbian,” as a rubric under which to engage in resistant activism. Taking this stance, she has countered Gayatri Spivak’s well-known concept of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1990: 11; see also Wallach and Clinton, this volume): the notion that one can embrace an identity category strategically so as to participate in collective political action even while recognizing the constructed character of all such categories. Butler has advocated instead what she calls “strategic provisionality”—a strategy of not confining oneself to a stable performance of gender so that “identity can become a site of contest and revision” (1991: 19). In her earliest writings (1990, 1991), Butler saw drag performance as one way of challenging the alignment between gender and sex, and highlighting the performative character of gender: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (1990: 137). She then posed the query, “And what kind of gender performance will enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire[?]” (139). In Bodies That Matter (1993: 219), she suggested that one answer might be found in the notion of “dis­ identification” developed by French Marxist theorist, Michael Pêcheux (1982). Building on Althusser’s concept of interpellation, Pêcheux distinguished three possible processes of identity formation. “Identification” refers to the situation of individuals who have successfully been interpellated to the dominant ideology and thus to dominant identity categories, while “counteridentification” characterizes individuals who have directly confronted such categories in a way that ultimately confirms and validates them (cf. Foucault’s notion of a reverse discourse, discussed above). In contrast to both of these ideas, Pêcheux defined “disidentification” as “a desubjectification of the subject” in which ideology “operates as it were in reverse, i.e. on and against itself, through the ‘overthrow-rearrangement’ of the complex of ideological formations” (1982: 158–59; italics in the original).

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In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), queer theorist and performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) used Pêcheux’s ideas to examine the work of US Latinx performance artists. For Muñoz, a “disidentificatory subject” is one “who tactically and simultaneously works on, with, and against a cultural form,” often by challenging the dichotomy between an individual’s desire for and identification with an other (12–13). In his best-known analysis, he examined the various incarnations of Vaginal Creme Davis, a drag artist of color who performed in the Los Angeles punk scene during the 1990s. One of Davis’s most striking stage personae was Clarence, a white male supremacist who represented an ideal that Davis’s female persona had viewed as “so hot” that she had transformed herself into him by undergoing racial and gendered reassignment. At one point in the performance, Clarence, who was deeply anxious about Los Angeles’s racial and sexual diversity, sang a song in which he addressed his sawed-off shotgun in an erotic manner in order to reassure himself of his safety in the city. In ­Clarence, Davis created a character who, although identifying himself as white and straight, emerged in the body of a queer transvestite of color—the very aspects of identity that he most deeply feared. Davis’s performance thus embodied the complexity of desire and identification across axes of identity (race, gender, and sexuality) that are central to US society and showed how they might converge to form one individual’s subjectivity. Drawing on Gramsci (1971: 3–23 and passim), Muñoz portrayed Davis not only as a performer but also as an “organic intellectual” who, through her connection to her community of queers of color, was able to analyze and then make tangible the multiple processes of othering that maintained their marginalization. Such an interpretation raises the issue of who counts as a “theorist” of gender: a scholar such as Butler or Muñoz, or a performer such as Davis? Indeed, within the realm of Anglophone popular music, one can view a number of prominent musicians, including Prince (Walser 1994) and Laurie Anderson (McClary 1991b), as having performed complex dimensions of identification in Western societies years before Butler and other academic theorists proposed their analyses.

Feminist Women of Color and Intersectionality During the period that Butler was first formulating her critique of the biological basis of sex and gender, a different sort of gender analysis was being developed by feminists of color. Beginning in the late 1970s, African American women writers such as the Combahee River Collective ([1977] 1979), bell hooks (1981), Angela Davis (1983), and Audre Lorde (1984) worked to consolidate a body of black feminist thought that would counter mainstream US feminism (see also Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 1982, Smith 1983, Collins [1990] 2000). They were joined by a number of Latina, Asian-American, and Native American women who addressed their particular situation within US society (see, for example, Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983). These writers argued not only that the “women” of the US “women’s movement” had largely been white and middle-class, but also that women of color had often been deliberately excluded from the very category of “women” in whose name demands had been made (hooks 1981; Davis 1983). Any analysis of the situation of women of color would thus need to consider gender and race together. Both Lorde and the Combahee River Collective advocated further that issues such as sexuality, class, and age should also be addressed. By the late 1980s, the term “intersectionality” emerged among African American scholars as a rubric for approaches that would highlight in particular the interrelationship of gender and race (see Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Collins and Bilge 2016). Although they recognized that the concept could be extended to other axes of social differentiation, their primary focus was the situation of black women. The theorist who coined the term,

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and whose writings have become fundamental to both gender theory and critical race theory, is African American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (b. 1959). In a series of articles (1989, 1991, 1993), Crenshaw argued that, in political, academic, and legal writings, the “woman” of US feminism was generally assumed to be white, while the “black” of antiracist writings was assumed to be male. As a result, these discourses marginalized or ignored the experiences of black women, who became the primary focus of Crenshaw’s legal and theoretical efforts. On the one hand, she argued that black women had distinctive life experiences that did not fit the formulations advanced by the women’s movement, and that gender relations in black communities, or between whites and blacks, were often portrayed by white commentators in ways that upheld racism. On the other hand, she argued that black women were often asked to subordinate their own concerns to those of the African American community in general, particularly regarding issues such as domestic violence, which implicated the behavior of black men. One of Crenshaw’s fullest expositions of an “intersectional” analysis addressed a topic in music—the 1989 obscenity trial of the Florida hip-hop group 2 Live Crew (Crenshaw 1993). Following a nuanced examination of both the trial and its coverage in the media, Crenshaw advanced two major conclusions. The first was that there had been a racial basis to virtually every aspect of the case: not only to much of the rhetoric that circulated within the courthouse and in media representations of the trial, but also to the bringing of the obscenity charge itself. Second and equally important, Crenshaw argued that the case had failed to address the implications of the group’s often violent lyrics regarding sexual relations, and hence had neglected the interests and concerns of black women.15 Since Crenshaw’s seminal writings, the notion of intersectionality has been both extended and critiqued. As Jennifer Nash has argued (2008), Crenshaw’s focus on legal cases, and specifically those targeting violence against women, has meant that the literature has not given sufficient attention either to the positive aspects of black women’s subjectivity or to factors of class, sexuality, or nationhood that further complicate the category of black women. Echoing Butler, she has pointed out that intersectional approaches can have the effect of reifying binary schemas (man:woman, white:black, heterosexual:homosexual, etc.), rather than recognizing the diversity that exists within any identity category. She has also posed the question of whether only marginalized social groups should be scrutinized through intersectional analyses, or also those who are in a more privileged position with regard to gender, race, class, sexuality, or other aspects of identity. Despite such critiques, the idea that any analysis of gender should include a consideration of its intersection with other forms of identification is now an established principle in US feminist scholarship and politics. In recent years, the concept of intersectionality has also been embraced by a variety of United Nations initiatives that consider gender relations on a worldwide basis. Jasmin Puar (2012) has questioned such efforts, arguing that they risk reinforcing the primacy of US feminism within global women’s forums by imposing identity categories that may be incommensurable with the ways in which individuals in other societies experience themselves.16 As Nira Yuval-Davis emphasizes (2006), the notion of intersectionality needs to be applied in ways that account for the complexity of local forms of identification and social differentiation, and the ways that they are intertwined in specific circumstances. (For a further discussion of black feminist thought and intersectionality, see Mahon, this volume.)

Masculinity Studies In a period when writings on intersectionality and queer theory were drawing increasing attention to subordinated groups, scholars also began to scrutinize the largely unmarked category of masculinity. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the field of “men’s studies”

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or “masculinity studies” began to develop, primarily within sociology (Kimmel, Hearn, and Connell 2005), but also in anthropology (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994). Perhaps the single most influential publication of this period was Masculinities ([1995] 2005) by the ­Australian sociologist R. W. (now Raewyn) Connell (b. 1944). Since its writing, Connell has authored or co-authored many additional writings refining her initial theories. On the one hand, her work has been heavily informed by empirical research carried out by herself, as well as other scholars influenced by her ideas. On the other hand, her approach has been formulated with careful attention to a broad range of theories of gender: from psychoanalytic and poststructuralist writings to sociological and anthropological case studies. Connell has characterized masculinity and femininity as “gender projects”: “processes of configuring practices” that unfold through time. She locates these processes in three principal realms: that of the formation of individual identities (she uses the psychological term “personality”); that of symbolic practices, whether characterized as discourse, ideology, or culture; and that of institutions, whether the school or workplace or, at a larger scale, the state (72). In Masculinities, Connell advances two principal arguments. First, there is never only one form of masculinity that characterizes a society in a given historical period; rather, multiple forms of masculinity coexist and interact, often differentiated by factors such as race, class, and sexuality. Further, a society’s diverse masculinities are organized hierarchically, so that one form is hegemonic—a cultural ideal that often characterizes the identities of men in the most privileged social positions. While some other forms of masculinity may be subordinate to the hegemonic one (e.g. working-class or gay masculinity), there are also complicit forms evident in men in relatively privileged positions who, while avoiding certain stances associated with the hegemonic form, nevertheless benefit from male privilege through what she terms the “patriarchal dividend” (79). By characterizing the dominant form of masculinity in terms of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, she emphasizes that the relationship among forms of masculinity within any society is unstable and open to contestation and challenge. This last observation is linked to her second point that, for any given society, masculinities have a history: specific forms have developed in specific ways in specific periods, generally in conjunction with economic and political factors. For example, she shows how the notion of the “man of the frontier” developed in settler societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and characterizes as “gentry masculinity” the dominant form in North Atlantic countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In turn, gender dynamics may actively precipitate developments in the economic or political realm: as one example, she describes the rise of fascism in the interwar period as “a naked reassertion of male ­supremacy” (193) in an era when women had been gaining significant political ground. Connell’s writings have informed studies in fields as diverse as psychology, s­ociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, criminology, and international relations (see, for example, Morrell 1998; Roberson and Suzuki 2003; Hooper 2008). In 2005, she and an associate evaluated this literature, together with criticisms of her earlier writings, and published a reformulation of the concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). There is no reason why Connell’s concept of multiple masculinities, with its attendant ideas about gender identity hierarchies and historical specificity, cannot be extended to forms of femininity. Furthermore, her attention to the dynamics of dominance and subordination within gender categories, particularly on the basis of race or class, can be seen as one possible approach to issues of intersectionality. Beyond examining the masculinities found within Western democracies, Connell has attended to processes of colonialism and imperialism, which she sees both as having been propelled by gender ideologies and as having introduced Western gender orders into other parts of the world, often challenging or displacing local ones (Connell 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). She has also

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noted new forms of masculinity that have gained ascendance in the realms of transnational business and finance (Connell 2012). Such dynamics only complicate the already complex portrait of gender relations that Connell has sketched within individual societies.

Reconceptualizing Agency and Resistance One of the basic assumptions of Western feminism has been that relations of gender and sexuality are asymmetrical, with heteronormative males claiming a patriarchal dividend and females and members of non-heteronormative groups occupying subordinate positions. Based on this assumption, a great many analyses have highlighted arenas in which women and sexual minorities have mounted “resistance” to patriarchy and/or heteronormativity. Because of the challenges that poststructuralist theories present to voluntarist notions of agency—and, as a result, to the idea of resistance—some scholars have drawn on such writings to rework both these concepts, in a manner consistent with the concerns of post-­ colonial theorists. Here I illustrate contrasting approaches to this issue through the writings of two prominent anthropologists who have examined gender in the context of late ­t wentieth-century Islamic movements in the Middle East. In her 1990 article “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” Lila Abu-Lughod (b. 1952) analyzed power relations in an Egyptian Bedouin community in terms of Foucault’s argument that power produces its own forms of resistance, and thus that “where there is power, there is resistance” (Foucault 1980: 95). By reversing Foucault’s terms, Abu-Lughod embarked on an effort to identify sites of resistance within the community as a means of diagnosing the workings of power (see also Foucault 1982). She took as her primary example the poetic genre ghinnawa (little song), which women, as well as young men, historically recited or sang to express “sentiments of vulnerability and love” (Abu-Lughod 1990: 46). Such sentiments ran counter to the honor-related discourses that upheld asymmetrical power relations based on gender and age in Bedouin society (see also Abu-Lughod 1986). In the late 1980s, as young men began to transform ghinnawa into a largely male, commercial form of music, young women turned to new resistant practices, ones that simultaneously allied them with their husbands or husbands-to-be while expressing rebellion toward their elders. These involved the purchase of mass-produced (and often imported) items such as makeup, lingerie, and bobby pins, which framed the young women in a more sexualized way consistent with notions of femininity that urban Egyptian women were embracing. Rather than highlighting the young women’s initiative and resistant spirit, Abu-Lughod argued that it was important to ask whether their actions were enmeshing them in new sets of power relations: ones based on consumerism fueled by transnational capital, as well as a breaking up of family ties that served the interests of the Egyptian state. In turn, some young women were refusing both the expectations of their elders and the seeming Westernization of Egyptian society by adopting emergent forms of Islam, which she analyzed as situating the women within yet another set of transnational power relations. In The Politics of Piety (2005), a study of Egyptian women who meet regularly at mosques for discussion and religious teaching, Saba Mahmood (1962–2018) offered a more fundamental challenge to established approaches to agency and resistance. In her analysis, ­scholars—and specifically those writing from a Western feminist perspective—often equate these two concepts, evoking the idea of agency only in instances where individuals are seen to be resisting societal constraints. As she argued, such an approach situates agency within a Western liberal framework, presenting it as entailing a casting off of societal norms so as to realize oneself as an autonomous, “free” individual (8). What would it mean, she asked, for agency to be conceptualized outside such a framework? Rather than depicting practices of

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Islamic piety as forms of resistance, Mahmood analyzed the women of the “mosque movement” as purposefully engaging in something akin to Foucault’s notion of “technologies of the self ” (1988)—consciously pursuing bodily practices, arrived at through an engagement with Islamic texts and historic interpretations, that produced them as pious subjects.17 Here agency was exerted not to resist norms, but to embrace and “inhabit” them. In line with Foucault’s earlier writings, Mahmood argued that the “discipline” provided by such practices did indeed constrain the women, but it also enabled them to realign their interior dispositions in a way consistent with their religious ideals. Rather than arising from a conscious exercise of free will, their agency thus needed to be understood as emerging “from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment” (15; cf. Butler 1993: 12–15). By focusing on the women of the mosque movement, Mahmood’s account does not address women from other segments of Egyptian society who, having embraced certain precepts of Western liberalism, might indeed view their engagement with Islam as a form of resistance to Western hegemony. Nevertheless, her study represents a notable intervention in the literature on gender dynamics in and beyond the West. It prompts one to ask if there is a better framework within which processes entailed in the reproduction and transformation of societal norms might be considered. Following the logic of Butler’s writings, in which what she refers to as a “lapse in repetition” (1991: 28) may work to destabilize norms of gender and sexuality, it might be possible to formulate an approach that accounts for diverse types of lapses: from small variations in performances of gender and sexuality that take place below the level of consciousness but that nevertheless might suggest incremental reworkings of the norm, to deliberate practices—such as those of the women of whom Mahmood wrote—whose goal is to embrace and conform to a new set of norms, to calculated disruptions of the logic of norms effected by performers such as Vaginal Creme Davis. In such a scenario, resistance emerges as too circumscribed a concept to encompass the diversity of possibilities.

Ethnomusicological Studies of Music, Gender, and Sexuality In the 1970s and 1980s, as anthropologists were developing cross-cultural approaches to gender research, ethnomusicologists began to examine how the sound-making activities of men and women complemented or contrasted each other, although they did not explicitly relate their findings to the growing gender literature (e.g. Feld 1982, Seeger 1987). The first major effort to relate musical practices to issues of gender appeared only in 1987—the volume Women and Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Ellen Koskoff. More than any other publication, Koskoff’s book established the topics of women and music, and music and gender, as crucial ones for ethnomusicological research. The book’s chapters were wide-ranging and were often richly historical. Its topics included women’s (and sometimes men’s) musical roles in domestic and ritual contexts, historical transformations in the roles of professional female performers, and women’s musical activities in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, right up to the rise of “women-identified music” and feminist choruses, both of which were associated with second-wave feminism. In her introduction, Koskoff surveyed and systematized the ethnomusicological literature on women’s musical activities, as well as studies that documented gendered divisions in musical practice, situating her remarks within a framework drawn from feminist anthropology. She then offered a theoretical summation of these accounts and suggested how studies of “women and music” and of “music and gender” should be approached going forward. Among her principal concerns was the effect of musical performance on a society’s gender relations—how aspects of musical practice relate to social ordering and whether musical

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performance maintains and confirms a society’s gender ideology or offers a challenge to it.18 More than many anthropologists of the period, she attended to social dynamics that might alter the character of a society’s gender relations over time and also examined the important role that cultural forms such as music might play in such processes. Since its publication, a number of ethnomusicologists have produced additional edited volumes on music and gender (e.g. Herndon and Ziegler 1990; Moisala and Diamond 2000; Magrini 2003; Harris, Pease, and Tan 2013; Magowan and Wrazen 2015). In 2014, Koskoff published A Feminist Ethnomusicology, a collection of writings on music and gender from across her career, which also reviews the literature in this area and provides an extensive bibliography. This book both complements and expands the work of the present essay. By the late 1990s, scholars in many disciplines had begun to shift their focus from women to gender and to draw increasingly on the writings of French theorists. It was in this context that I published my 1997 study Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings, which examined the relationship between the contrasting song performances of women and men in a diasporic Albanian community and their senses of themselves as gendered individuals. Drawing on the writings of Bourdieu and Foucault, I argued, in a manner similar to Butler, that singing at large community weddings “engendered” ­individuals—it served as a crucial site for both the constitution of gendered subjectivity and the negotiation of ongoing community understandings of gender norms. In my ­analysis, I distinguished between discursive and non-discursive aspects of such processes. On the one hand, many of the gender-specific aspects of singing were learned and performed with little or no verbal explication. Through their singing, participants thus drew on their “practical mastery” (Bourdieu 1977) of the community’s repertoire to perform in ways that most often reinscribed community understandings of gender. However, as immigrants who were encountering very different gender norms in North America, individuals were also introducing small changes into their performances, often in an unreflexive manner that suggested gradual revisions of those norms (cf. Butler). On the other hand, community members frequently evoked established discourses linking aspects of singing to notions of morality. Men in particular often deployed a discourse of “honor” (cf. Foucault; see also Abu-Lughod 1986) to evaluate their musical performances. In doing so, they asserted the role that they, as male heads of their households, played in sustaining a community ethos of egalitarianism among family groups while simultaneously claiming authority over other household members. It was necessary, I argued, to combine a Bourdieusian attention to non-verbal practices with a Foucauldian attention to discourses if one wished to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the relationship of music to gender. Taking such an approach did not prevent me from attending to the meanings that individuals ascribed to singing, nor to their lived experience, but it did entail a consideration of the fundamental role of discourse and practice in constituting both shared meanings and experience.19 Whereas Engendering Song touched upon themes of agency and resistance in the negotiation of gender norms, more recent scholarship has addressed these themes more explicitly. In The Dance of Politics: Gender, Performance, and Democratization in Malawi, folklorist Lisa Gilman places the singing and dancing of Malawian women in the context of the country’s political life (2009). During the period of British colonial rule, women frequently danced to their own singing as part of their country’s independence movement. Malawi became independent in 1964, and in 1971 Hastings Kamuzu Banda was declared president for life and a single party state was established. Women from rural areas were now required to travel long distances to dance at massive rallies in honor of Banda and thus found themselves coerced into a performance role that served to validate his authoritarian regime. Here Gilman draws on Abu-Lughod (1990) to argue that, in resisting colonial rule, the women had established a link between dance and politics that drew them into a new set of largely disadvantageous

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power structures. Such a process continued in the period of multi-party rule that followed Banda’s death, when women were recruited to dance at the rallies of newly emergent political parties. Although their participation was voluntary, many women felt pressured to do so because of political or economic factors. Gilman’s research explores the ways in which women related and responded to their political activities. How did they analyze their role as dancers? Did they participate willingly and, if so, why? If not, what options did they have for avoiding compliance with the state, and how did they choose among them? Based on extensive interviews with women of various social classes, Gilman draws a complex picture of the women’s responses and utilizes a number of theoretical resources. On the one hand, she notes that, during the period of multi-party rule, women were able to exert political agency by criticizing a specific party in their song texts or by dancing in support of women candidates. On the other hand, following Mahmood, she shows that, while the Western idea of individual resistance was salient for elite members of women’s organizations, this concept was not meaningful for the majority of women who were asked to dance. By constituting dance as “traditional” and “African” and casting opposition to it as unpatriotic, Malawian state discourses in fact made it difficult not to participate. Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Gilman demonstrates that many aspects of women’s participation were naturalized for the dancers, so that they did not directly question them. Using ideas from Foucault, she traces how, at times, women explained their decision to dance by situating themselves within the discourses deployed by various political parties. Ultimately, Gilman concludes, women dancers made decisions regarding their participation based on their reading of their immediate circumstances but did not engage in more comprehensive diagnoses of their place within Malawian society. As a result, their choices of political action had a limited effect on the country’s political culture and did not improve their social standing. Gilman’s study stands out as a particularly probing exploration of the character of agency and both the possibility and limitations of the notion of resistance. Men in African societies have faced their own sets of issues related to gendered identity. In her article “Shoot the Sergeant, Shatter the Mountain” (2004), ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes examines the Zulu men’s song and dance genre ngoma as “a critical means to attaining responsible manhood” (173). To do so, she draws on writings in phenomenology as well as extensive research on South African masculinities (Morrell 1998; cf. Connell 2005). A form of competitive dance accompanied by song, ngoma evokes the Zulu masculine ideal of the warrior and is performed by migrant men, both individually and in groups. Meintjes shows how performers use the verbal and bodily practices of ngoma to enact male power by balancing explosive, “hard” chants and movements with softer, “sweet” ones. Whereas the group songs that accompany ngoma dances outline positive aspects of manhood that any man might strive to attain, the elaborate nicknames that are shouted to dancers during their individual performances highlight a wide range of contrasting masculine qualities that individual men might cultivate so as to navigate a social world in which they face unemployment, high rates of AIDS, and frequent calls to violence. Meintjes traces several ways in which ngoma serves as a “source of power” for participants, one that might lead them to make either constructive or destructive life choices. The challenge for ngoma participants is to learn to balance the hard with the sweet, and individuality with group solidarity, so as to thread their way through the treacherous possibilities that migrant men face. (For a more extended analysis, see Meintjes and Lemon 2017.) To understand the complex ways in which music and dance relate to gender and sexuality, scholars not only engage in ethnographic research on contemporary practices, but also trace performance histories through archival research. African American studies scholar Jayna Brown takes the latter approach in her book Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers

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and the Shaping of the Modern (2008). Brown’s study charts the history of African ­A merican women artists on the variety stage from the late nineteenth century to World War II. These women were not only prominent performers in the US; in many cases, they made multiple tours of Europe and at times centered their activities there. Whereas for A ­ merican audiences, the women embodied everything from the “primitive” plantation slave to the ultramodern career woman, European audiences saw them as representatives of the pure folk or as erotically charged colonial subjects. Combining semiotic analysis with a Foucauldian attention to discourses of race, nation, and colonialism, Brown examines the women’s performances as “multi-signifying practices” that “glanc[ed] in all directions” (97): they met and then returned the gaze of various audiences in ways that both played into and played with audience expectations. If at times their performances reinscribed existing stereotypes, they also found ways to undermine and explode them. Brown pays particular attention to relations between black and white women performers. To do so, she posits a cultural dynamic of “racial mimicry,” in which white women frequently laid claim to repertoires and styles of performance learned from black women. By detailing the ways in which race, gender, class, and nationality interacted in diverse contexts, Brown’s study extends intersectional considerations into a trans-Atlantic arena. Her work serves not only to affirm black women performers as central to the history of US jazz, but also to complement Paul Gilroy’s work on the black Atlantic (1993) by highlighting the role that women played in early ­t wentieth-century Afro-diasporic imaginings of the modern. (On Gilroy and the black Atlantic, see Mahon, this volume.) Much of the ethnomusicological literature on gender has been developed within a binary, heteronormative framework. One major exception is Anna Morcom’s 2013 book, Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion, which examines the diversity of sexual practices and gender identities that have informed a range of song and dance genres in contemporary and historical North India. Morcom’s study, which combines historical and ethnographic methods, focuses on two groups that were pushed to the margins of society, as performance styles in India were “reformed” in the early twentieth century as part of the country’s independence movement. (For more information on scholarship on this period, see Manuel, this volume.) The first group is composed of female singer-dancers, categorized historically in a number of ways, who were members of hereditary lineages. The second group comprises what Morcom calls “female impersonators”: biological males performing, and sometimes living, as females, known by the term kothi. In the past, both groups were associated with forms of performance that included erotic elements, and members of both groups at times had sexual relations with their male patrons, who were most often members of the elite. A landscape of complex gendered and sexual arrangements thus emerges that defies any binary analysis. With little public recognition of their legacy as artists, many members of both groups are now making their living as sex workers in increasingly impoverished and dangerous circumstances. One of Morcom’s aims in the study is to help these groups gain greater recognition as heirs to longstanding performance forms—a recognition that could lead to more secure and safer livelihoods. Morcom’s nuanced account of the situation of contemporary kothi is a particularly valuable component of her study. Today, some kothi are married to women and live publicly as heterosexual men, while others identify as female and, in some districts, are able to marry male partners. In contemporary India, as Morcom explains, it is only relatively elite individuals who identify with Western notions of LGBT identity; the Indian state and various aid organizations therefore designate kothi as MSM (“men having sex with men”). Following Butler, however, Morcom argues that many kothi should be regarded instead as transgender and that it is in dance performance that they are most able to experience themselves as women, their desired gender identity. Morcom’s book serves as a reminder that

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realms of music and dance have often served as protected spaces and sources of livelihood for individuals who have been marginalized by their society’s gender norms, and conversely that many acclaimed genres of music and dance have been created by and associated with such individuals. As research continues on the complexity of gendered and sexual practices worldwide, one hopes that more musical studies such as this will be undertaken.20

Case Study: Researching Dance, Gender, and Youth Culture in a Diasporic Community During the 1990s, I attended several weddings in Canada of Prespa Albanian couples who were a generation younger than those discussed in my 1997 book. One striking aspect of these weddings was the popularity of a new form of dance, called çoçek or çyçek, that was at the time also a major fad among young people in several southeast European states. What made this dance so attractive to young people, and particularly young women? My initial hunch was that çoçek, which was much more sensual and attention-getting than older forms of Prespa women’s dance, enabled young women to present themselves at social occasions as a new type of Prespa woman: proudly Albanian and Muslim, but also recast in the mold of contemporary youth culture. I saw their performance of femininity as breaking with historical precedents and as potentially contributing to the negotiation of new gender norms within the community (cf. Butler). And so I embarked on a research project that would trace a “history of the present” (cf. Foucault), both of the dance itself and of the form of femininity that Prespa women were performing through it (Sugarman 2003). I quickly discovered that the movements associated with çoçek originated in the early Ottoman period in types of entertainment presented for elite audiences. One aspect of my work thus needed to be archival, and involved locating and analyzing historical accounts and visual depictions of Ottoman dance that were produced by both Ottoman subjects and Western European travelers. Beyond the descriptive information that I gleaned from such sources, I found that depictions of Ottoman dance were often deployed within either orientalist discourses21 about Ottoman society or nationalist discourses developed by individual Balkan national groups. In both instances, Ottoman dance was used to cast Balkan Muslims and their culture as other to Europe and to Christianity. A second aspect of my research was ethnographic. This involved attending dance events and conducting interviews among Albanian communities in North America, and as well as Western Europe and the Republic of Macedonia. Through my ethnographic inquiries, I was able to examine the significance that çoçek had come to have for young Albanians (cf. Geertz) and how it related to current gender relations within their community. Exploring this topic, I drew on the theoretical literature on gender and sexuality, nationalism, and colonialism, as well as studies of diaspora, media representation, and the body. Writings on former Ottoman territories or contiguous areas were especially helpful. In the course of my research, I arrived at three main conclusions. First, as Morcom found in India, gender and sexuality in Ottoman territories had been constructed in complex ways that had implications for the movement repertoires associated with male and female dancers. Until the early nineteenth century, the most prominent professional Ottoman dancers had been young men, known as köçekler (sing. köçek, from which the term çoçek derives), who dressed in semi-feminine attire and were the objects of desire of male patrons. I posited that, as European discourses on monogamy and heteronormativity were introduced into the Empire in the nineteenth century (cf. Connell), and as male-male relations were no longer publicly acceptable, köçekler were replaced as public dancers by women, most often from the low-status Romani ethnic group.22 Furthermore, among more elite strata of society, two distinct categories of women had been recognized: domestic women, who

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were regarded as “respectable,” and “public” women, who were not, among whom were included professional dancers.23 As “respectable” domestic women, what young Prespa women were doing was incorporating movements into their dance that had been associated in earlier times with “public” women, in ways that enabled them to challenge community norms of respectability. A second conclusion was that Prespa women were incorporating more than Ottoman movements into their dance: they were combining those with contemporary movements associated either with Turkish belly dancing (also descending from Ottoman forms) or North Atlantic club cultures. They had learned about both of these primarily through electronic media. In all of these genres, women dance in a more sensual, or even sexually suggestive, manner that invites the male gaze.24 As I spoke with women and attended community events, I learned that gender-segregated dances, at which young women performed for the approval of prospective mothers-in-law, were being replaced by integrated events at which young women danced for the approval of potential male suitors. Here, a young woman’s dancing was no longer meant to demonstrate that she was physically healthy and able to do household chores, but rather to signal to young single men that she would be an attractive sexual partner. As part of this shift in courtship practices, young women were also changing their physical appearance by cultivating slimmer, more “fit” bodies and wearing tighter, more revealing clothing—practices learned from the transnational media and current North Atlantic youth cultures. By evoking the imagery of MTV and the world of fashion, they were thus performing a version of femininity that, while confirming their Balkan Muslim roots, also situated them firmly within a Western form of commodified sexuality. Here I invoked Abu-Lughod’s argument that, by challenging community norms of respectability, the young women were also entering into a new set of power relations, one characteristic of North Atlantic advanced capitalism. In closing, I pointed out similarities between developments in this one Albanian community and those in a range of other societies, from India to Indonesia, North Africa, and the US. In all these contexts, certain performance forms of respectable women have, over time, drawn on repertoires or styles once associated with “other” categories of women: slaves, courtesans, religious performers, or—in the US—exotic dancers. In doing so, they have not so much challenged patriarchal norms as they have encapsulated norms formerly associated with multiple categories of woman within a single woman’s body. As in the ­A lbanian example, those “other women” have often come from marginal segments of society, distinguished from respectable women by ethnicity, race, caste, religion, marital status, or sexuality. While it can be tempting for scholars to interpret new cultural forms, such as Prespa çoçek, as instances of resistance that free young women from older notions of propriety, it is important to acknowledge both the new sets of power relationships in which such forms enmesh them and the ways in which these new practices have, in many cases, removed marginalized groups from the realm of performance.

Looking Ahead The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in studies in ethnomusicology and related fields on gender and sexuality. The great majority focus on the activities of women: a compensatory project that is still much needed. (Many of these are noted in Koskoff 2014.) In addition, monographs highlighting masculine identities (Spiller 2010; McCracken 2015), non-heteronormative subjects (Amico 2014; Hubbs 2014; Morad 2015), the interaction of multiple gender categories (Sunardi 2015; Hutchinson 2016), and intersecting aspects of identity (Hayes 2010) have all appeared in recent years. Scholars have also begun to integrate considerations of gender, and less often sexuality, into studies that foreground other

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topics, including nationalism (Yano 2002), colonialism and post-colonialism (Weidman 2006), war and conflict situations (Ceribašić 2000; Pilzer 2014), diaspora (Maira 2002), religion (Rasmussen 2010), citizenship and the public sphere (Stokes 2010), affect (Gray 2013), and the rise of digital technologies (Miller 2017). This “gender plus” approach is one that all scholars would do well to keep in mind, since few topics that ethnomusicologists address are devoid of a gendered dimension. On the horizon are emerging theoretical frameworks in the humanities and social sciences that promise new ways to approach relationships among music, gender, and sexuality. Whether these will coalesce into a major theoretical paradigm shift, as some advocates argue, or whether they will be added to the array of approaches that are already available to researchers (and that are discussed in this volume), is not yet clear. I think of these as approaches “beyond,” in that each attempts to expand the scope of existing disciplines and paradigms as they are currently constituted. One such approach is the move beyond music to the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. Much of the sound studies literature to date has focused on technologies and their effects, and has therefore privileged domains historically dominated by males; it is thus not surprising that male scholars predominate in the field itself. Perhaps as a consequence, gendered aspects of sound remain under-researched, with some important exceptions (Keightley 1996; Naeem 2011; Perea 2017). (On sound studies and ethnomusicology, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume.) A second approach seeks to move beyond traditional conceptions of the human. This work has been prompted by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), certain strains of affect theory (Massumi 2002; Ahmed 2004; Gregg and Seigworth 2010), approaches labeled as the “new materialisms” (Coole and Frost 2010), and the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (or STS; Felt et al. 2016). Writings in this vein work against poststructuralism’s perceived overemphasis on language, discourse, and representation, and seek to conceptualize gender and sexuality in terms of “how the body is materialized, rather than what the body signifies” (Puar 2012: 57). At least three variations of these concerns may be discerned in recent literature on gender and sexuality. The first includes “new materialist” approaches that seek to undo the Western dualities of nature/culture and mind/ body by linking work on gender and sexuality more closely to the material world (Grosz 1994; Barad 2003; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). A second strand has explored relationships between humans and technologies through concepts such as the “cyborg” (Haraway 1985) and the “post-human” (Hayles 1999; Braidotti 2013; see also Parisi 2004). A final strand looks to the relationship of humans to other species and to the Anthropocene (the epoch of natural history defined by human impacts on the environment; see Grusin 2017), including writings in ecofeminism (Mies and Shiva 1993). Taken together, very different views of gender and sexuality are emerging from such writings, although it is as yet unclear how they might fruitfully be applied to studies of music and sound. These scholarly developments raise a host of questions for future ethnomusicological research. As a new generation of scholars emerges that has grown up with more fluid notions of gender and sexuality, how will such a perspective be reconciled with attempts to analyze persisting forms of global inequality based on these and other forms of social differentiation? Will concern for the environment and for human relationships with other species be seen as so urgent that it will override a concern for social divisions among humans? Finally, to what extent can the North Atlantic basis of much of the present and past theorizing on gender and sexuality, based as it is on Western epistemologies and ontologies, be reconciled with efforts to “decolonize” ethnographic disciplines? Such issues will need to be addressed in any future scholarship that relates music, or any form of sound, to notions of gender and sexuality.

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Notes 1 There is also an extensive literature in musicology, dating largely from the 1980s on, that often draws on different theoretical approaches than those discussed here. See, for example, Clément (1988), ­McClary (1991a), Solie (1993), Brett, Wood, and Thomas (1994), Smart (2000), and Borgerding (2015). 2 Estelle Freedman’s reader (2007) is notable for its inclusion of women’s writings from many world areas. Baksh and Harcourt (2015) survey contemporary transnational feminist movements. 3 Major recent histories of feminist theory (Mann 2012; Tong and Botts 2017) and compilations of feminist writings (Mann and Patterson 2015; McCann and Kim 2016) now diverge from the model of “waves” in various ways and offer criticisms of its shortcomings. Taken together, these books present a far fuller and more nuanced overview of feminist theory than can be attempted here and are strongly recommended, particularly for highlighting approaches that have rarely been employed in music studies. Running counter to these trends, writers such as Munro (2013) and Rivers (2017) now posit the emergence of a “fourth wave.” Pilcher and Wehelan (2004) provide a helpful guide to major concepts in gender studies. 4 Some other current acronyms are LGBTQQIP2SAA (lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-queer-­questioningintersex-pansexual-two spirit-asexual-ally; see D’Souza 2016), and Queer/LGBTIQA2Z (­lesbian-gaybisexual-transgender-intersex-queer (or questioning)-asexual (or allies)-two spirited-gender neutral, as proposed by an Occupy Wall Street caucus in 2011; see Queerows 2011). “Two spirit” is a designation favored by some Native Americans. 5 The Collective is credited in some sources as having coined the phrase “identity politics” (1979: 365), although this ascription is not uniformly accepted. Although the phrase is often criticized as encouraging essentialism, the Collective’s formulation, in fact, emphasized the interaction of specific forms of oppression and their relationship to the class structure of US society: “We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives” (366). 6 This distinction was first postulated by sexologist John Money, prompted by his research with “intersex” individuals—those who, biologically and/or physiologically, cannot clearly be classified as male or female (Money 1955; see Haig 2004 for a history of usage of the term “gender”). 7 One structuralist text that remains provocative to the present day is Gayle Rubin’s article, “The ­Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), whose complex analysis draws on Lévi-Strauss as well as Marx, Engels, Freud, and others. Rubin was unusual in this period for including a consideration of sexuality in her analysis and for advocating for “an androgynous and genderless (although not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (1975: 204). 8 For readers assembling more recent anthropological writings on gender and sexuality, see Robertson (2005) and Brettell and Sargent (2017). 9 The Enlightenment refers to a broad movement in eighteenth-century European philosophy that includes thinkers like Voltaire (1694–1778), Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Immanuel Kant ­(1724–1804). Central themes in Enlightenment philosophy include the view that science and rationality will lead to human progress, a distrust of tradition and authority as the basis of beliefs about the world, and liberal political philosophy, which emphasizes human rights (including a right to private property) and the autonomy of the individual subject (see Bristow 2017). In the nineteenth and twentieth c­ enturies, Enlightenment ideals were critiqued by a range of intellectual traditions, including Marxism (as discussed, for example, in Femia [1993: 11–67] and Sayers [2007]; on Marxism and ethnomusicology, see Manuel, this volume), poststructuralism (discussed by Sugarman, above), and post-colonialism (see Wallach and Clinton, this volume). Drawing on these traditions, critiques of Enlightenment ideals also animate some of the work in sound studies and voice studies (see Meizel and Daughtry, this ­volume). —Harris M. Berger. 10 On the relationship between poststructuralism and phenomenology, see Berger, this volume. 11 Bourdieu was also a central figure in a body of social thought known as practice theory. See Text Box 2.1. 12 On the notion of modernity, see Manuel (this volume) and Wallach and Clinton (this volume). 13 It is not coincidental that many Western discourses constituting “racial” groups, as well as norms of mental and physical health, developed in much the same period (see Berger and Stone, Introduction, note 15, this volume; Mahon, this volume). Ann Laura Stoler (1995) has extended and critiqued Foucault’s analysis by demonstrating how crucial European colonialism was to the development of intertwined Western discourses of gender, sexuality, and race. 14 For debates from this period on the relationship of feminism to poststructuralism, see Nicholson (1990) and Ramazanoglu (1993). Forms of US feminist theory that resist poststructuralist arguments

Gender and Sexuality  93 in whole or part have been labeled as “realist” (cf. Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000) or “standpoint” (cf. Harding 2003). Ethnomusicologists have drawn very little on such writings, but they nevertheless represent valuable streams of theorizing. 15 For an illuminating exchange on issues of gender, sexuality, and race as they intersect in the realm of performance, see the essays by bell hooks (1992: 145–56) and Judith Butler (1993: 121–40) on the documentary film Paris Is Burning (Livingston 1990), which profiles the drag shows of transvestite and transgender performers of color in 1980s New York City. 16 At present, perhaps the realm of greatest contestation over identity categories at the international level is that of LGBT or queer politics; see, for example, Waites (2009). 17 Foucault defined “technologies of the self ” as practices that permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (1988: 18) 18 Koskoff’s framing of these issues is consistent with the emphasis placed on live performance in ethnomusicological scholarship during the period in which she was writing. Nevertheless, her concerns could easily be extended to other dimensions of sound or musical practice. 19 For a classic essay proposing a poststructuralist conceptualization of experience, see Scott (1992). 20 For a pioneering study of “mixed gender” individuals who have been crucial to a musical practice, see Robertson (1989) on Hawai’ian māhū and their role in the preservation of hula. 21 On orientalism, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume). 22 Scholarship published since my research was completed now enables scholars to know a great deal more than I did at the time about male-male sexual relations in the Ottoman period; see particularly Andrews and Kalpaklı (2005). 23 The terms “respectable” and “public” are from Gerda Lerner, who notes that such a division in Middle Eastern societies can be traced back at least to ancient Assyrian law and was the basis for the earliest documented instances of women’s veiling (Lerner 1986: 134–35; see also Ahmed 1992: 14–15). 24 The notion of the “male gaze” has been attributed both to art historian John Berger (1972) and to feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey (1975).

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Gender and Sexuality  97 Meintjes, Louise. 2004. “Shoot the Sergeant, Shatter the Mountain: The Production of Masculinity in Zulu Ngoma Song and Dance in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Ethnomusicology Forum 13 (2): 173–201. Meintjes, Louise, and T. J. Lemon. 2017. Dust of the Zulu: Ngoma Aesthetics after Apartheid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mies, Maria, and Vandana Shiva. 1993. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books. Miller, Kiri. 2017. Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpady. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonialist Discourses.” Feminist Review 30: 61–88. ———. 2002. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2): 499–535. Moisala, Pirkko, and Beverly Diamond, eds. 2000. Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Money, John. 1955. “Hermaphroditism, Gender, and Precocity in Hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic Findings.” Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital 96: 253–64. Monson, Ingrid. 1997. “Music and the Anthropology of Gender and Cultural Identity.” Women and Music 1: 24–32. Moore, Henrietta L. 1988. Feminism and Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morad, Moshe. 2015. Fiesta de diez pesos: Music and Gay Identity in Special Period Cuba. New York: Routledge. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. New York: Kitchen Table; Women of Color Press. Morcom, Anna. 2013. Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion. New York: Oxford University Press. Morrell, Robert. 1998. “Of Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern African Studies.” Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (4): 605–30. Moya, Paula M.L., and Michael R. Hames-Garcia, eds. 2000. Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Munro, Ealasaid. 2013. “Feminism: A Fourth Wave?” Political Insight (September): 22–25. Naeem, Asma. 2011. “Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewing’s A Reading, Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph.” American Quarterly 63 (3): 461–85. Nash, Jennifer C. 2008. “Re-thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89: 1–15. Nettl, Bruno. 1983. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Nicholson, Linda J., ed. 1990. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Ortner, Sherry B. 1974. “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” In Woman, Culture, and Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 67–87. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Comparative Study of Society and History 26 (1): 126–66. Ortner, Sherry B., and Harriet Whitehead, eds. 1981. Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parisi, Luciana. 2004. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology, and the Mutations of Desire. London: Continuum. Pêcheux, Michel. 1982. Language, Semantics, and Ideology. Translated by Harbans Nagpal. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Perea, Jessica Bissett. 2017. “Audiovisualizing Iñupiaq Men and Masculinities On the Ice.” In Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, edited by Joanne Barker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pilcher, Jane, and Imelda Wehelan. 2004. 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies. London: Sage. Pilzer, Joshua D. 2014. “Music and Dance in the Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ System: A Case Study in the Performing Arts, War, and Sexual Violence.” Women and Music 18: 1–23. Puar, Jasbir K. 2012. “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory.” Philosophia: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2 (1): 49–66. Queerows. 2011. “Welcome to the Queer/LGBTIQA2Z Caucus @ Occupy Wall St.” https://queerows. wordpress.com/2011/12/13/hello-world/.

98  Jane C. Sugarman Ramazanoglu, Caroline, ed. 1993. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism. New York: Routledge. Rasmussen, Anne K. 2010. Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reiter, Rayna R., ed. 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review. Rivers, Nicola. 2017. Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides. Cheltenham: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberson, James E., and Nobue Suzuki, eds. 2003. Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. New York: Routledge. Robertson, Carol E. 1989. “The Māhū of Hawai’i.” Feminist Studies 15 (2): 313–26. Robertson, Jennifer, ed. 2005. Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, and Louise Lamphere, eds. 1974. Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. Sayers, Sean. 2007. “The Individual and Society in Marx and Hegel: Beyond the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.” Science and Society 71 (1): 84–102. Scott, Joan W. 1992. “Experience.” In Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, 22–40. New York: Routledge. Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Smart, Mary Ann, ed. 2000. Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New York: Kitchen Table; Women of Color Press. Solie, Ruth A., ed. 1993. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spiller, Henry. 2010. Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution.” In The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sara Harasym, 1–16. New York: Routledge. Stokes, Martin. 2010. The Republic of Love: Cultural Intimacy in Turkish Popular Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sugarman, Jane C. 1997. Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. “Those ‘Other Women’: Dance and Femininity among Prespa Albanians.” In Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, edited by Tullia Magrini, 87–118. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sunardi, Christina. 2015. Stunning Males and Powerful Females: Gender and Tradition in East Javanese Dance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tong, Rosemarie, and Tina Fernandez Botts. 2017. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction. 5th ed. New York: Routledge. Waites, Matthew. 2009. “Critique of ‘Sexual Orientation’ and ‘Gender Identity’ in Human Rights Discourse: Global Queer Politics beyond the Yogyakarta Principles.” Contemporary Politics 15 (1): 137–56. Walser, Robert. 1994. “Prince as Queer Poststructuralist.” Popular Music and Society 18 (2): 79–89. Weidman, Amanda. 2006. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yano, Christine. 2002. Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (3): 193–209.

4 Constructing Race and Engaging Power through Music Ethnomusicology and Critical Approaches to Race Maureen Mahon The music of racialized peoples—Native Americans and African Americans in the United States and colonized people around the world—has received extensive ethnomusicological attention. The question of race, however, has not been a central focus of research in our discipline. Historically, the field rejected the notion of race, a system that organized people into “unequal or ranked categories theoretically based on differences in their biophysical traits” (Smedley 1998: 693). Instead, ethnomusicologists focused on culture. Here, they followed the lead of Franz Boas (1858–1942), the founder of ­A merican cultural anthropology, who argued that all humans have the same biological capacity to develop language, religion, and kinship structures but do so in differing ways based on cultural factors.1 In the early twentieth century, Boas’s research had shown that the biological differences between the so-called racial groups were negligible. The task of the anthropologist, he insisted, was to document and analyze human culture, not race, and to do so from a perspective that avoided hierarchical models that viewed North Western Europeans as separate from and superior to Africans, Asians, and indigenous peoples. In his view, each cultural group was to be understood relativistically—on its own terms and according to its own internal logic. Focusing anthropological attention on culture was a key part of Boas’s anti-racist program. In ethnomusicology today, scholars are carrying forward that agenda by returning attention to race—not as a biological category but as a socially constructed concept that shapes ideas and practices associated with music and social life. They work from two key assumptions: first, that there is a long-standing relationship between racial meanings and musical practice; and second, that as ethnomusicologists, we should map this relationship and analyze its social, economic, political, and cultural implications. Thinking critically about race in the context of music and about music in the context of race, ethnomusicologists have drawn on an interdisciplinary array of texts that together enable the theorization of and insights into the relationship between race and music. This chapter begins with an overview of some significant critical studies of race and then turns to a discussion of ethnographic writings, including my own, that deploy these ideas. While I primarily draw my examples from and refer to scholarship about the United States and the African diaspora, I do not mean to suggest that the issue of race and music is limited to these regions. This emphasis reflects my scholarly focus but should not overshadow the fact that race-like forms of status and racialized hierarchies exist far beyond these contexts. Whether in the United States, South Africa, Europe, or elsewhere, ideas about race ultimately constitute a worldview through which people perceive, interpret, and deal with human differences (Smedley 2012: 5). Reconsidering the complex relationship between music and race is therefore a central issue for contemporary ethnomusicology. 2

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Critical Approaches to Race: Theoretical Foundations The critical scholarship that I explore below represents some of the ways that intellectuals have theorized race in relation to power and identity. This work offers tools for understanding how a category that is not biologically real has become socially meaningful through the thoughts and actions of individuals, communities, and institutions. Writing from the dawn of the twentieth century through the end of his life, African American scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), the preeminent black intellectual of the twentieth century, made an invaluable contribution to critical race studies. Exploring the everyday experience of being black in a white majority society, his classic The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1997) reveals the nature of the lives that African Americans led “behind the veil” and unseen by white Americans. In a much-cited passage, he outlines the psychic and social condition of African Americans: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (38) Here, Du Bois articulates the challenge of achieving a coherent identity in the face of intense racial animus. The concept of double consciousness identifies the double-burden of race—the need to fight both an external antagonist for citizenship rights and the need to fight the internalized racism that leads to the questioning of one’s own humanity. Coupled with a common history of forced migration and slavery, as well as contemporary experiences of second-class citizenship, the psychic condition that Du Bois describes fuels a sense of connection among African Americans, one that contributes to their unity as a group and a “race.” His analysis of this political formation was the basis for Pan-Africanism and black nationalism, movements with which Du Bois was associated, and the creation of the first civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, of which Du Bois was a founding member. As one of the earliest analyses of the meaning and complexity of racial identity, Du Bois’s work reverberates in race and ethnic studies today. Writing some fifty years after Du Bois, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) considered the psychic impact of race on people of African descent in the Caribbean and throughout the African diaspora. A practicing psychiatrist born in Martinique, Fanon attended to the psychology of race and questions of consciousness in order to theorize the impact of empire on colonized peoples. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he applied the tenets of psychoanalysis to the Negro in the West and tried to understand what he viewed as the pathology that blacks exhibited as a result of colonial domination. Central to his interpretation was the nature of the relationship between black and white populations: members of the white community despised people of African descent because of Western culture’s association of blackness with impurity; people of African descent accepted this judgment and despised themselves. Fanon argues that, as a result of this, black people imitate European speech, dress, and thought, and develop other features of personality and behavior to insulate themselves against their own self-hatred. Fanon characterizes this as the assumption of a “white mask.” Although he focused on the psychological, Fanon acknowledged that without an analysis of social conditions and changes in the social order, black people in the West would not be able to truly liberate themselves from colonial alienation. (See Wallach and Clinton [this volume] for a discussion of Fanon in relation to decolonization. See Berger [this volume] on Fanon’s relationship with phenomenology.)

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Both Fanon and Du Bois assumed that black people had a common group identity because they shared a common history and occupied a similar position in the social hierarchy. Indeed, it was these factors, Fanon and Du Bois felt, that brought people of African descent together as a race.3 By the late twentieth century, a point at which the mainstream of scientific opinion had rejected the view that there were significant biological differences between the races, social science scholars began historicizing the emergence of both the concept of race in the United States and the accompanying social processes of racial formation.4 This work emphasized that race is a social construction (a conceptual framework that Du Bois, Fanon, and Boas did not use) and related its development to colonialism in the New World. In the 1990s, responding to public discourses that rested on the assumption that there were meaningful biological differences among the races, the American Anthropological Association issued a statement on the biology and politics of race that continued Boas’s battle against scientific racism. Tracing the history of and rationale behind the concept of race, the statement asserted: “[R]ace” was a mode of classification linked specifically to peoples in the colonial situation. It subsumed a growing ideology of inequality devised to rationalize European attitudes and treatment of the conquered and enslaved peoples. Proponents of slavery in particular during the 19th century used “race” to justify the retention of slavery. The ideology magnified the differences among Europeans, Africans, and Indians, established a rigid hierarchy of socially exclusive categories[,] underscored and bolstered unequal rank and status differences, and provided the rationalization that the inequality was natural or God-given. The different physical traits of African-Americans and Indians became markers or symbols of their status differences. (AAA Statement on Race 1998) A comparison of the ways in which race is defined in differing societies makes clear that race is a social construct. Describing the distinctive ideas about race that developed in the United States, Audrey Smedley observes: First, the dichotomous race categories of black and white are [seen in the US as] set and inflexible. Unlike in South Africa or Latin America, there is no legal or social recognition of a racial category in between black and white (“mixed-race” or “colored”), and one cannot belong to more than one race. Second, the category “black” or “African American” is defined by any known descent from a black ancestor, thus conflating and socially homogenizing individuals with a wide range of phenotypes and ancestries into one racial category. Third, one cannot transcend or transform one’s race status; no legal or social mechanism exists for changing one’s race. (2012: 7) It is worth noting that the US system for defining race is not consistent across different groups. While anyone with any degree of known African ancestry is categorized as black, the federal government requires proof of at least one-quarter Native American ancestry to be recognized as part of that group and receive the rights and benefits associated with it. Scholarship explaining how constructions of race have changed over time and across space demonstrates that people can redefine and even dismantle race if they have the will to do so.5 The research on race and racial identity that emerged in post-War Britain nuanced and challenged the scholarship on the social construction of blackness. A leading figure in this effort was Stuart Hall (1932–2014), and to understand his work, we need to place it in its intellectual and social context. Born in Jamaica, Hall helped to establish the interdisciplinary

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field of British cultural studies during the 1970s, and he made questions of race, identity, and representation central for this field. Along with Hall, cultural studies scholars such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Paul Willis, Paul Gilroy, and Hazel Carby shared a commitment to Marxist analysis that sought ways to examine the complexity of culture (broadly defined) and its interplay with politics and economics.6 In this regard, they reacted against a then dominant strain of the Marxist tradition that saw a society’s economic base as ultimately determining its culture. Their work was part of a broader intellectual movement known as “Western Marxism,” which took its cue from Marx’s early writings and emphasized the role of culture in history. Central to all of this were the ideas of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), an Italian Marxist who used the notion of hegemony to analyze relations of power under capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the ensemble of cultural formations in a society (e.g. education, family structure, religion, popular culture, and media) that work together to infiltrate the daily private lives of individuals and produce a pattern of beliefs and practices that maintain the power of capital and the state (Gramsci 1997). Gramsci argued that hegemony is a less overt and more effective form of power than direct domination, coercion, or physical force; understanding its workings was crucial, he believed, if radical activists were to challenge existing social orders. For Gramsci and the cultural studies scholars he influenced, culture was a crucial site of hegemonic struggle, and any given hegemony was only a temporary resting place in the ongoing balance of forces in a society. Following Gramsci, cultural studies scholars focused on what they called “cultural politics.” By this term, they meant processes of seeking, creating, and contesting meaning through cultural practices that are outside of traditional electoral or state politics but are still shaped by larger social forces and have significant consequences for the maintenance of power relations in a society. (See Manuel [this volume] for a discussion of cultural studies and Marxism.) Hall’s interest in race, media, and cultural politics inspired him to focus attention on the issue of representation. Based on Gramsci’s ideas but taking them in powerful new directions, Hall argued that the question of representation was important because: [h]ow things are represented and the ‘machineries’ and regimes of representation in a culture … play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event role [in society]. This gives questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation—­ subjectivity, identity, politics—a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the constitution of social life. ([1989] 1996: 444, original emphasis) In other words, cultural representations, like those of racial identity, do not simply reflect social relations; on the contrary, they are one of the means by which such relations are established and maintained. Writing in the Britain of the late 1980s, Hall identified what he called a “new politics of representation.” 7 In a wide range of genres, Hall argued, black artists of the period were abandoning perspectives that presented “a singular and unifying” vision of black experience and were instead creating work that grappled directly with difference (1996: 441). These artists acknowledged what Hall called “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject” and the necessary “recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which compose the category ‘black’” (1996: 443). (At the time that Hall was writing in Britain, people of West Indian, West African, and South Asian descent were all categorized as “black.”) In this context, Hall argued for a historicized view of identity, one that recognizes it as a “‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (1992: 221).

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Applying Hall’s ideas about cultural identity to the experiences of racialized groups allowed him and his followers to challenge the tendency to simplify and stereotype the identities of people of African descent. Paul Gilroy, for example, elaborated Hall’s critique of essentializing racial discourses and theorized the experiences of and complex relationships among people of African descent in Great Britain and the African diaspora (e.g. Gilroy [1987] 1991, 1993, 2000). In There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Gilroy historicized black life in England, a category of experience that was either overlooked in British cultural studies and British cultural consciousness (hence his irreverent title) or depicted it in an oversimplified manner that represented black people as either “problems” or “victims” ([1987] 1991). His study reveals the ways concepts of racial difference and racial hierarchies were constructed in England, how these racial meanings have constituted English social and political life, and how they shaped understandings of the nation and of national belonging. Concerned with analyzing “the complex interplay between struggles based around differing forms of social subordination,” Gilroy discusses both class and race (1991: 28). Through case studies of the legal system, anti-racist activism, and black British expressive culture, he shows that although race does not correspond to biological reality, it remains a crucial analytic category for understanding and addressing inequality in contemporary Great Britain (cf. Fields 1982). It wasn’t only British cultural studies scholars who highlighted the heterogeneity of ­people from the African diaspora; attention to difference had long been the focus of black ­feminist thinking about race as well. Indeed, the earliest political organizing among A ­ frican ­A merican women grew out of a response to the particularity of their experience as ­people who were at once black and female. When black feminist activists and intellectuals t­heorized their position, they highlighted the ways that the intersecting experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, and power shaped black women’s lives.8 A foundational text in this area is “A Black Feminist Statement,” written in 1977 by the Combahee River Collective, a ­Boston-based group of black feminist activists. They wrote: The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. (1983: 210) Theorizing from their lived experience, these activists argued that they could not “separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously” (213). Their departure from a singular emphasis on race to a focus on the intertwined impact of gender, race, class, and sexuality on women’s experiences was disruptive to the orthodoxies that dominated the civil rights and women’s liberation movements—ones in which the Combahee Collective members and numerous other black women had been involved. The shift was a necessary and productive linking of personal experience, activist practice, and political theory. The relationships among multiple dimensions of identity that so interested the ­Combahee River Collective were a major concern for other black feminist intellectuals and came to be known as “intersectionality,” a term coined in the late 1980s by University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Crenshaw was one of a coterie of legal scholars at the forefront of critical race theory (CRT), a body of writings that analyzed the workings of race and power in US law and society. Scholars of CRT did more than just trace the social construction of race; they sought to expose the relations of power and

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economic interests that keep race and racial thinking in place in the legal system. Using a multidisciplinary approach that integrated Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, these scholars marshaled a race-conscious critique of US law, often integrating personal stories with legal arguments and analyses of historical context to challenge “the ways in which race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture and, more generally, in American society as a whole” (Crenshaw et al. 1995: xii). This scholarship, primarily the work of people of color, sought to uncover “the ongoing dynamics of racialized power, and its embeddedness in practices and values which have been shorn of any explicit, formal manifestations of racism” (xxix).9 Countering the prevailing legal theories of the period, which assumed that the law was neutral, objective, and color blind, CRT scholars showed how US law was rooted in the self-interest of the dominant group and sustained white supremacy. (On intersectionality, see also Sugarman [this volume] and Text Box 2.2.) The work of critical race theorists in identifying the unacknowledged workings of racialized power led legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris to focus sustained attention on whiteness. In her essay “Whiteness as Property,” she shows how, in the United States, “rights in property are contingent on, intertwined with, and conflated with race” and demonstrates that “[t]hrough this entangled relationship between race and property, historical forms of domination have evolved to reproduce subordination in the present” (1995: 277). Her central point is that in a society organized by racial caste, in which blacks are subordinate and whites are dominant, whiteness is “treasured property;” it affords benefits that whites guard and protect (1995: 277). Harris details the ways economic and legal privileges are accorded to those who are categorized as white. “Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits,” she explains, “and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law” (1995: 277). Harris’s approach draws attention to whites as a group and to their group interest in maintaining a system in which they have disproportionate power. Informed by CRT in legal studies but hailing from the social sciences and the humanities, a number of scholars have followed Harris in interrogating whiteness. Helping to establish the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies, these researchers shift focus from the liberal, individual conception of the subject (who can claim “I’m not a racist” to deflect blame) to an emphasis on systemic racism and the way that structural context shapes the construction of all racial identities—not just those of blacks. By making whites visible as a group, whiteness studies scholars counter the common-sense perspectives of many white Americans, who do not actively self-identify by race, a category they reserve for racial others.10 In the introduction to her interview-based study of racial identity among white women, Ruth Frankenberg lays out the central premises of whiteness studies: Naming “whiteness” displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance. Among the effects on white people both of race privilege and of the dominance of whiteness are their seeming normativity, their structured invisibility….To look at the social construction of whiteness, then, is to look head-on at a site of dominance. (1993: 6) Whiteness studies scholars work from the belief that “racism shapes white people’s lives and identities in a way that is inseparable from other facets of daily life” and turn the analytical lens on white people in order to examine the persistence of racial power (Frankenberg 1993: 6). The period following the 1960s saw a burgeoning of research that examined the cultural politics of race. However, as Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman have observed, musicology and ethnomusicology came to these topics much later.11 In 2000, Radano and Bohlman published an edited volume intended to address this lacuna and galvanize their

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colleagues to take seriously the fact that “the racial as it has been variously constituted within the contested spaces of difference is the Western ground on which the musical experience and its study has been erected” (2). Seeking to make music scholars engage these issues, Radano and Bohlman focused on the “racial imagination,” which they defined as “the shifting matrix of ideological constructions of difference associated with body type and color that have emerged as part of the discourse network of modernity” (5). Calling for “a new racial hearing” in music studies, Radano and Bohlman offered the volume’s case studies as examples of the kind of race-conscious work that they hoped their intervention would encourage (38).12 In the next section, I discuss ethnographies by ethnomusicologists that continue this trajectory and address race, politics, culture, power, and the persistence of the racial imagination in music and society.

Critical Approaches to Race in Ethnomusicology Scholars engaged in the critical ethnomusicology of race examine the ways in which ideas about race and ideas about music interact to construct concepts of authenticity in racial identity and musical practices. Explicitly or implicitly, intersectionality is a focus in this work, as these scholars consider race in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality to ascertain how these diverse categories inform musical and social experience. Undertaken in the wake of British cultural studies’ defining writings and the turn to practice theory (an intellectual movement that tries to understand the nature of human action and its limits within social structures; see Text Box 2.1), all of the studies I discuss here are concerned with the analysis of power, particularly the ways in which power is enacted and contested through discourses and practices related to race and music. Louise Meintjes focuses on these themes in Sound of Africa! (2003), her ethnography of the production practices that unfolded in a South African music studio in the 1990s. The book traces the ways musicians and producers, South Africans and foreigners, blacks and whites, work together to produce music that “sounds Zulu,” conveying “Zuluness” and “blackness” through its musical qualities, vocal style, song texts, and production approaches. Meintjes examines the racial and ethnic dimensions of the discussions that developed as her interlocutors debate musical meanings (particularly those associated with genre of mbaqanga), and she traces the ways in which the recording process produces and disseminates ideas of otherness, Africanness, and Zuluness. Analyzing the musical values that the artists express in both performance and conversation, the book reveals the mutually constitutive processes through which people construct racial meanings, apply them to music, and return to those racialized musical forms to construct and represent their social identities. Approaching both the act of music making in the studio and her own ethnographic writing as forms of mediation and experimentation, she demonstrates the ways cultural producers connect and translate disparate worlds, peoples, sounds, and ideas. Race and its intersection with gender and sexuality are the focus of Songs in Black and Lavender, Eileen Hayes’s 2010 multi-sited ethnography of women’s music festivals in the United States. Here, Hayes is concerned with “manifestations of black feminist consciousness” in women’s music, a genre category that developed in the 1970s as white lesbian activists created women-only networks of musical performance and production (Hayes 2010: 1). Hayes engages in participant observation and conducts interviews with African American women musicians, so-called “flygirls in the buttermilk” (6), whose experiences unfold in a social world that is dominated by white lesbians. Illustrating how the persistence of racism in queer communities conditions the experiences of African American women, Hayes explores the interracial engagements and misunderstandings that occur within the women’s music community. Weaving together the commentaries of her interlocutors, her

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experiences at music festivals, and contemporary social theory, she “reveals women’s music festivals as sites of black women’s musicking and theorizing about gender, race, sexual identity, and other issues that fall broadly under the rubric of politics with a small p” (31). Blending humor and academic rigor, Hayes’s ethnography shows the significance that women’s music festivals hold for black lesbians, a sorely underrepresented group in ethnomusicological and academic studies generally. Matt Sakakeeny’s ethnography Roll With It draws on the fieldwork he conducted in New Orleans among black working-class musicians, both before and after Hurricane Katrina, to examine the everyday ways in which African American brass band performers experience the nexus of race, economics, and power (2013). Working within a practice theory framework, Sakakeeny shows how the young men who were his interlocutors “use tradition to provide people with a sense of community through music,” reconfigure those traditions “to resonate with contemporary experience,” and “accumulate status and earn a living by playing music in diverse contexts” (2013: xv). While Sakakeeny highlights the agency of the musicians in his study, he also attends to larger social forces by marking the men’s vulnerability to the risks of poverty, violence, and exclusion that all working-class black people face in the new millennium. Recognizing that these brass band musicians experience social and professional mobility not easily available to other New Orleanians of their race and class, Sakakeeny does not lose sight of the limits that they encounter and attends to the social context and structural forces that condition the lives of his interlocutors. Describing how his field experiences influenced his thinking, he explains, “I began to ask more critical and expansive questions: How is race lived? What can the unprecedented crisis of Hurricane Katrina reveal about the historical consistency of vulnerability, and where does music reside within these histories?” (10). His attention to the experience of race and the lives of musicians beyond the music-making event yields a compelling ethnography that illuminates the subjectivities, identities, and circumstances of his interlocutors and offers insight into the phenomenon of precarity—the condition of economic and social instability increasingly faced by working-class populations under conditions of contemporary capitalism (xv). In her 2004 collection of essays Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music, Deborah Wong draws on ethnographic research to address the politics of race and identity in the contemporary US. The volume focuses on Asian American participation in genres not typically associated with that group, such as jazz and rap, and explores the questions of power, access, and representation that arise when they do so. Intended to counter the invisibility of Asian Americans in ethnic studies, music studies, and US racial discourse, Wong considers the ways in which practices of racialization shape the experiences of Asian American performers. Her ethnographic practice enables her to detail the challenges that her interlocutors encounter as their racialized bodies limit the acceptance of their music by audiences from other groups. Attention to both performance (the use of music and other expressive forms to actively create representations of identity) and performativity (the everyday reproduction of identity categories through mundane behavior and discourse) are important to Wong’s project (6). (See Sugarman [this volume] and Waterman [this volume] for further discussions of performativity.) With striking clarity, Wong articulates the political investments that motivate her work: “I am an Asian American scholar and musician who spends a lot of time with Asian American scholars and musicians—and I write about that interaction. I write not from the privileged stance of a cultural insider but as an activist mindful of difference and with a commitment to coalition politics” (2004: 8). Wong is equally clear about her commitment to ethnography: “I think that politically responsible ethnographic work is an essential critical inroad to the broader project of understanding people, music, power, etc.” (8). While many ethnomusicologists of race share Wong’s investment in ethnographic fieldwork, others conduct historical research, and two important works in this area have

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focused on jazz in the United States. Patrick Burke’s 2008 monograph Come in and Hear the Truth explores the “musical and racial tensions and collaborations” (3) between the black and white musicians who played in New York City’s 52nd Street jazz scene in the 1930s and 1940s. His study highlights “the instability of both musical and racial categories,” as expressed through debates about genre and authenticity, and addresses issues of “mutual influence between musical style and racial representation” (5). Burke’s purpose is not to offer a chronological narrative of the development of jazz, but to demonstrate that ideas about racial identity, racial authenticity, and musicianship informed the ways audiences, critics, and musicians understood the music being created on 52nd Street. Painstakingly researching the popular press archive of the period and interpreting his findings through a framework that links the social construction of race to the development of jazz, Burke shows how this vibrant music scene both challenged and reinscribed dominant racial ideologies. Ingrid Monson’s 2007 study Freedom Sounds focuses on a later moment in jazz history— the 1950s and 1960s—but shares Burke’s concern with the racial politics of this genre. She observes, “During the civil rights movement, the intractable conflicts that emerged over race, leadership, strategy, and policy goals were quite similar in many respects to the arguments over race, power, aesthetics, and economics that took place in jazz” (6). Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with musicians, Monson works to acknowledge both “the historical salience of the category of race in the history of jazz and also to delineate the way in which it is complicated by other sociological variables (such as class and gender) and the history of interracial debate” (7). Monson approaches her study through a framework informed by practice theory and the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault. This enables her to offer a representation of the racial politics and cultural aesthetics that were at play in jazz during the civil rights era, as well as the discourses and social structures that shaped the experiences of both African American and non-African American participants in the jazz scene. As such, Monson’s study is an extended “critical essay on the relationships among the music, racism, and society in a particular historical period and what we have to learn from them” and an insightful consideration of race, power, and music history (23).13 The ethnomusicologists I have discussed in this section pay detailed attention to musical sound and performance, and provide carefully contextualized analyses in order to reveal the complexities and contradictions that emerge as people confront the workings of music, race, and power. The concept of race and the disciplines of anthropology and ethnomusicology were born in the context of European colonialism; the music scholars that I have discussed here are part of a larger effort to acknowledge our field’s colonial heritage and to develop approaches to ethnomusicological research and writing that counter colonialism’s persistent negative effects. One of the leading theorists in this movement, Beverley ­Diamond, argues that ethnomusicologists must cease the practice of “‘mining’ communities for cultural [or musical] gems.” Drawing on her extensive ethnographic experience with First Nations and Sami culture bearers, she urges ethnomusicologists to work in “collaboration with their I­ ndigenous partners, jointly defining research objectives and methods” and ­modeling an ethnomusicological practice that foregrounds reciprocity, responsibility, and ethics (2012: 10). The shifts in emphasis and approach that Diamond proposes seek to decolonize ethnomusicology as a scholarly discipline and use its theories and methods to serve the interests of communities that continue to contend with the devastating impact of colonial relations of power and difference. Ethnomusicologists taking critical approaches to the study of race contribute to this important effort by putting race, power, and difference—concerns at the heart of the colonial project—at the center of their research on music. (See Wallach and Clinton [this volume] on colonialism and the colonial legacy in ethnomusicology.)

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Race, Power, and Difference in the Field: New York City, 1994 The critical approaches to race and power that I have outlined in this essay informed my fieldwork with New York- and Los Angeles-based African American rock musicians affiliated with the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), a non-profit membership organization founded in 1985. When I started my research in the mid-1990s, BRC members had been using music-based activism for almost a decade to counter limiting institutionalized discourses about black identity and cultural production. They were motivated to start the organization because of a problem they confronted in their musical and social lives: family, friends, and music industry executives questioned their involvement in a form that, in spite of its roots in African American music, no longer seemed to be “authentically black.” By the 1980s, rock was understood to be music created by and for white people. Black rockers encountered artistic, professional, and interpersonal challenges because their musical proclivities did not match those presumed appropriate to their racial identities. During the two years that I conducted fieldwork—which entailed attending BRC member meetings, concerts, and rehearsals; listening to member recordings; and conducting interviews—my goal was to learn how these musicians theorized and engaged in the politics of race and how they addressed the limitations placed on black expressive culture and black identity. The encounters and conversations I had in the field led me to attend to the intersection of race and gender in ways that I had not considered when I was writing my research proposal and planning my fieldwork. It was not a single event but rather the cumulative experience in the BRC community and my positionality as an African American woman that led me to an intersectional approach, and it was an intersectional approach that helped me make sense of what I encountered. As I explain in my book: I was familiar with both the persistent strain of conservatism that coexists with rock’s more rebellious impulses and the marginal position of women in the genre when I started this project. Still, once in the field, I was surprised to see how deeply naturalized the stereotypical male and female rock roles were. The people I met in studios and clubs usually asked if I was a vocalist or, much more frequently, a girlfriend of one of the men I was talking with. Only a handful of people asked if I played an instrument. Time in the field was time in a male milieu. BRC members were primarily men; the clubs and studios they worked in were staffed almost entirely by men; and the stores where they shopped for instruments, recording equipment, and CDs were populated almost exclusively by men. (2004: 207) Although I sometimes could talk about “BRC members” in collective terms, it quickly became clear to me that gender was a significant form of differentiation that I needed to address. My initial focus was on the challenges women members faced as they pursued careers in rock: Their gender and race mark them as doubly outside of rock ‘n’ roll’s white male club. Like white women they are intruding on male space and like black men they are treading on white territory. As black women, they have to fight for recognition and respect as legitimate rock performers. (208) To illustrate the decisive impact that the intersection of race, gender, and musical genre had on BRC women, I analyzed the professional trajectories of Sophia Ramos and Felice Rosser, artists who were prominent in the BRC at the time of my research. Despite having

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loyal local fans and initially attracting the attention of major labels, both women saw their careers stall. Record label executives, convinced that nonwhite women presented an insurmountable sales challenge in the rock market, opted not to offer them contracts or did not support them once under contract (209). Paralleling my attention to the impact of race and gender on women affiliated with the BRC, I also examined the intersectional experiences of male BRC members. This focus was also a response to my own positioning. The ethnographer’s identity is always at play in fieldwork, and this point was driven home for me late one evening when I was the only woman in a recording studio with five men. The musicians had just finished a rehearsal in which one of the participants improvised a sardonic song comprised solely of the lyrics “a black man did it.” A conversation developed that addressed personal relationships and ranged over current events at a time when former football player O. J. Simpson was in the news. The musicians talked about black men being blamed for crimes committed by white perpetrators and speculated about the guilt or innocence of Simpson, who was about to go on trial for murder. They talked about race, celebrity culture, and the limits of crossover; they talked about the challenges of marriage; they talked about the realities of divorce; they joked about how difficult women could be. And then one of them invited me to speak up on behalf of women, reminding me that I was not a neutral observer but a raced and gendered participant. Even though the conversation was not about music, I discussed it at length in my book because it crystallized the ways a particular group of African Americans articulated and interpreted questions of race and gender (225–28). They did so in a social context that stereotyped black men and black masculinity. How could they, as real people rather than caricatures, formulate their identities as African American men and, as Du Bois might put it, achieve true self-consciousness? The conversation threw into relief the fact that “the BRC provided a distinctively black male space in which black men could bond, talk, and work together” to make music, but also to make themselves (228). Ideas from critical race studies—particularly those related to the Combahee River Collective’s insistence that it was impossible to isolate race from gender when discussing lived experience and Stuart Hall’s claim that racial identities are productions that are never complete—helped me link the conversation to the larger questions I addressed in my study. I concluded: BRC men and women contended with the same dominant assumptions that proper rockers were white men. As BRC members attacked the racial ideologies that marginalized blacks from rock, ideologies about gender shaped the ways they carried out the organization’s agenda. BRC men and women had to deal with the intersection of race, gender, and rock although from different perspectives and emphasizing different concerns. (229) The conversation also threw into relief the differences, complexities, and conflicts that the intersection of gender and race entail. Addressing these dynamics was critical to my research process.

Looking Ahead The research I carried out with BRC members and the studies I discussed in the previous section offer examples of how ethnomusicologists have taken critical approaches to race and music. The interventions of two recent publications suggest productive new directions that work in this field can take. Gabriel Solis’s research on music and racialization in what he calls “The Black Pacific” (2015) traces the alliances that have formed between, on the one hand, indigenous musicians from Australia and Papua New Guinea

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and, on the other, people of African descent from North America and the Caribbean; this work demonstrates the efficacy of bringing critical attention to the globalization of the concept of race. Using both archival and ethnographic research, Solis maps the ways the political uses of blackness have developed in the Southwestern Pacific since the early twentieth century through the circulation of recorded music and face-to-face connections among African diaspora musicians, activists, and sailors. Solis examines how these links are sounded through the musical practices of indigenous people, a focus that leads him to explore the globalization of race as both a form of restrictive differentiation and a social formation that provides a positive identity. His research shows how musical ideas and practices circulate across national borders, while considering their aesthetic and political significance. Solis also directs attention to interactions between marginalized groups, a decolonizing move that decenters the powerful and reveals the ways in which disempowered people living through post-coloniality have developed relationships across difference. (On globalization and post-colonialism in ethnomusicology, see Wallach and Clinton [this volume].) Working in a different vein, Alisha Lola Jones (2017) examines the intraracial dimensions of race, music, and identity formation through a focus on black male vocal performance of gender and sexuality in African American Protestant churches; her work demonstrates the value of an intersectional approach. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in churches in Chicago and Washington, DC, Jones’s research reveals gospel music performance as a practice through which African American male vocalists negotiate heteronormative notions of masculinity and anxiety about black masculine identity and sexuality. Jones’s decision to root her analysis of sexual and gender expression in black feminist scholarship and a queer of color critique (see Sugarman, this volume) allows her to take a layered approach to understanding the ways in which singers and the congregations to which they minister assign meanings to instrumental, vocal, and physical gestures, reading some as “effeminate” and others as “masculine.” Her intersectional focus enables her to connect these interpretations to the gender and sexuality politics that play out in African American churches and attend to the discourses and practices that sustain patriarchy, heteronormativity, misogyny, and homophobia, while also shaping the male vocal performances at the center of her study. (On vocality and race, see also Meizel and Daughtry, this volume.) Like other ethnomusicologists doing critical race work, Solis and Jones center power in its many dimensions, ranging from colonialism to patriarchy. I draw attention to their research because it addresses the relationship between music and race through frameworks—­g lobalization, post-coloniality, intersectionality, and queer studies—that place ethnomusicologists in an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue that enriches our field. At the same time, this work contributes more broadly to the theorization of the social construction of race by emphasizing power, musical practice, and everyday life. Whether based on long-term ethnographic research in a single community, multi-sited fieldwork, or extensive archival research, the contemporary ethnomusicology of race follows our discipline’s assumption that music is both a social practice—in the words of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s own definition of the field, “a human activity that is interrelated with its social and cultural context” (n.d.)—and a cultural product that must be studied holistically. The scholarship in this area offers fine-grained accounts of the practices through which people make musical and racial meanings. This is important work. Race, a socially constructed and scientifically debunked category, continues to have a pervasive impact on the experiences of individuals and on our understandings of the music they make. This persistent reality makes the critical study of race fertile ground for ethnomusicologists.

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Notes 1 See Baker (1998) for a discussion of Boas’s efforts to use the culture concept to combat the scientific racism that dominated the United States in the period before World War I. 2 In this essay, I focus on race rather than ethnicity, a term that has been used to talk about forms of difference that people imagine to be cultural, rather than biological. Racialized groups have sometimes constructed positive ethnic identities out of racial categorization (e.g. “Black Is Beautiful”) and have also appropriated the term race for positive use. For example, in the early twentieth century, a “race man” or “race woman” was an African American who did social or political work on behalf of his or her group. Similarly, in the 1970s, Chicano Movement activists used the term La Raza (the race) as an affirming group label. A substantial body of literature has been written about both ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and race, but examining these topics is beyond the scope of this chapter. 3 For critiques of this type of race-centered identification and organizing, see Appiah (1992), who argues that Du Bois accepts as real “illusions of race,” and Fields (1982), who argues that class (a material circumstance) and not race (an ideological notion) is the appropriate lens for understanding inequality and power. 4 For examples of this work, see Gossett (1997), Jacobson (1999), Omi and Winant (1986), and Smedley (2012). 5 For example, see Wagley (1975) for a discussion of racial categorization in Latin America and the Caribbean. 6 Many of the scholars who developed this approach were associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, and their work is often referred to as the Birmingham School. For examples of black British cultural studies work by Hall, Gilroy, and Carby, see Baker, Diawara, and Lindeborg (1996). 7 The politics of representation was also an important theme in the politicized anthropology of the 1980s (see Berger and Stone, Introduction, this volume). The idea that cultural practices contribute to the constitution of social orders is also a major theme in practice theory (see Text Box 2.1). 8 See Guy-Sheftall (1995) for a collection of formative writings in black feminism. 9 Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Marti Matsuda, Kendall Thomas, and Patricia Williams are among the leading figures in this field. See Crenshaw et al. (1995) for representative writings. 10 See Delgado and Stefancic (1997) for a collection of key works in whiteness studies. 11 For another race-conscious perspective on historical musicology, see Ramsey (2001) and (2004). 12 Among the twenty essays collected in the volume are contributions by ethnomusicologists including Philip Bohlman, Jocelyne Guilbault, Peter Manuel, Thomas Turino, Christopher Waterman, and Deborah Wong. 13 For a further discussion of Monson, see Beaster-Jones (this volume).

Works Cited American Anthropological Association. 1998. “AAA Statement on Race.” http://www.americananthro. org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2583. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1992. “Illusions of Race.” In In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Baker, Houston A., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds. 1996. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baker, Lee D. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burke, Patrick. 2008. Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Combahee River Collective. 1983. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 210–18. New York: Kitchen Table; Women of Color Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, Article 8: 139–67.

112  Maureen Mahon Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Pellen, Kendall Thomas, eds. 1995. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press. Delgado, Richard, and Jeab Stefancic, eds. 1997. Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. ­Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Diamond, Beverley. 2012. “Recent Studies of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Music in Canada.” In Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada, edited by Anna Hoefnagels and Beverley Diamond, 10–26. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) 1997. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited and with an introduction by David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford Books. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fields, Barbara. 1982. “Ideology and Race in American History.” In Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, edited by J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, 143–77. New York: Oxford University Press. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilroy, Paul. (1987) 1991. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:” The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gossett, Thomas F. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Gramsci, Antonio. (1971) 1997. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly, ed. 1995. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press. Hall, Stuart. (1989) 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Moreley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 441–49. London: Routledge. ———. 1992. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” In Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, edited by Mbye B. Cham, 220–36. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Harris, Cheryl I. 1995. “Whiteness as Property.” In Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, edited by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, 276–91. New York: The New Press. Hayes, Eileen M. 2010. Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women’s Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1999. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Alisha Lola. 2017. “Are All The Choir Directors Gay? Black Men’s Sexuality and Identity in Gospel Performance.” In Issues in African American Music: Power, Gender, Race, Representation, edited by Portia K. Maultsby and Mellonee V. Burnim, 216–36. New York: Routledge. Mahon, Maureen. 2004. Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Meintjes, Louise. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Monson, Ingrid. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Radano, Ronald, and Philip V. Bohlman. 2000. “Introduction: Music and Race, Their Past, Their Presence.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, 1–53. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr. 2001. “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade.” Musical Quarterly 85 (1): 1–52. ———. 2004. “The Pot Liquor Principle: Developing a Black Music Criticism in American Music ­Studies.” American Music 22 (2): 284–95.

Constructing Race  113 Sakakeeny, Matt. 2013, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smedley, Audrey. 1998. “‘Race’ and the Construction of Human Identity.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 690–702. ———. 2012. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Society for Ethnomusicology. n.d. “What Is Ethnomusicology?” https://www.ethnomusicology.org/ page/AboutEthnomusicol. Accessed March 23, 2019. Solis, Gabriel. 2015. “The Black Pacific: Music and Racialization in Papua New Guinea and Australia.” Critical Sociology 41 (2): 297–312. Wagley, Charles. 1975. “On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas.” In The Nacirema: Readings on American Culture, edited by Michael A. Rynkiewich and James P. Spradley, 173–84. Boston: Little, Brown. Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge.

5 Theories of the Post-colonial and Globalization Ethnomusicologists Grapple with Power, History, Media, and Mobility Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton Introduction Perhaps one day it will strain credulity that theories of imperial domination and cross-cultural exchange were once marginal to ethnomusicology. Yet it took the much-ballyhooed crisis of representation in the 1980s and the publication of Arjun Appadurai’s 1990 essay “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” to shift the priorities of a once comfortably colonial field. Originally a positivist discipline concerned with making formal comparisons across cultures, then later focused on the painstaking ethnographic documentation of musical life in specific locales, ethnomusicology was ill-prepared for the assault on its epistemological and ethical foundations represented by the waves of highly politicized theoretical work in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, many ethnomusicologists viewed this development with more than a little trepidation. This chapter discusses post-colonial theory and the literature on globalization, two important and related bodies of thought with which ethnomusicologists in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were compelled to engage. Their responses took several forms, including an interest in colonial history and capitalism, the analysis of the global circulation of technologically mediated popular musics, and attention to the musics of diasporic communities. Post-colonial theory and the scholarship on globalization helped ethnomusicologists analyze these new topics and made their research more relevant to contemporary life. Our aim for this chapter, then, is threefold: first, to sketch the full historical context for post-colonial thought and debates about globalization; second, to summarize key works and concepts in these areas; and third, to survey recent ethnomusicological scholarship and suggest ways in which scholars in our field have contributed to the larger, transdisciplinary conversation on cultural processes in the post-colonial, globalized world. In doing so, we will show how ethnomusicologists have employed post-colonial and globalization discourses to confront the injustices of a sordid history (and the present-day miseries those injustices create) in ways that are intellectually productive and ethically responsible.1 Marx, Power, and the Post-colonial World The ethnomusicologist Thomas Solomon has observed that, Despite the near-ubiquity of the experience of colonialism, especially in the kinds of places where they until recently were most likely to carry out research, ethnomusicologists have barely begun to grapple with the issues that the history and legacy of colonialism raise. (2012: 216) The challenge posed by theories of the post-colonial condition and globalization was first and foremost a reckoning with the reality of power differentials in situations ranging from

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the fieldwork encounter to the world geopolitical order. In the 1980s and 1990s, much of the theoretical work in these areas led to a reconsideration of relations between the “center” (a term that is usually used to refer to former colonial powers and, occasionally, major cities in the developing world) and “peripheries” (former colonies and rural areas)—not, as is sometimes claimed, the dissolution of distinctions between them. Theories of post-­ coloniality and globalization can be understood, at least in part, as responses to Karl Marx, in that both schools of thought extend and challenge Marx’s critique of class domination. Within ethnomusicology, early pioneers like Charles Keil ([1966] 1991) and Peter Manuel (1988) had begun to bring Marxist-influenced perspectives to the discipline. Informed by theories of post-colonialism, globalization, and other critical approaches, many other ethnomusicologists in the mid-1990s saw a new relevance in Marx’s ideas (see Wong 2014). (On Marxism in ethnomusicology, see Manuel [this volume].)2 Approaches derived from post-colonialism and globalization theory resemble Marxist orientations in that they seek to understand systems of unequal exchange. Marx famously exposed the inherently exploitative dynamic at the heart of capitalism: the bourgeoisie underpays the proletariat for the labor that produces commodities, and the resulting surplus value becomes the capitalists’ profit ([1867] 1915). Thus, capitalism is premised upon an unequal exchange of money for alienated labor between those who own the means of production (e.g. factories) and their employees. Post-colonial theory focuses upon unequal exchanges between colonizer and colonized, stressing that the psychosexual, cultural, and political-economic dynamics of that relationship do not disappear when colonies become independent countries. The scholarship on the globalization of culture centers on the unequal exchange between the global and the local, with some writers choosing to emphasize the “top down,” coercive nature of that encounter (Schiller 2009) and others pointing out that, despite power differentials, exchange is never entirely in one direction (Pieterse 1994). Theories of post-colonialism and globalization—and their concomitant schemes of unequal exchange—have been used in various ways by ethnomusicologists.3 For example, Timothy D. Taylor’s 1997 study of world music emphasizes the domination of non-Western musicians by the Euro-American recording industry, while Daniel Reed (2016), in a study of Ivorian dancers in the diaspora, stresses how individual agents use discourses of world music authenticity to their own advantage. Reviewing a wide range of diasporic Ivorian practices, Reed concludes that “[a]ll of these are examples of crafty and worldly individuals exhibiting cosmopolitan sensibilities as they transform experience into labor and form into commodity for a North American market hungry for diversity” (133–34). Music has always been a peculiar exchange object, just as performance has always been a peculiar form of labor. Music can be as ephemeral as sound waves, but it can also be as material as a written score or recorded artifact (Wallach 2003). And with the ease of circulation that the Internet allows, the materiality of a digital file—once solidly manifest in the CD—is now negligible. In this context, music is simultaneously text and thing, subject to both the limiting logic of material scarcity and the endless flow of immaterial signs. This dual nature has created difficulties in the ethnomusicological application of theories of post-coloniality and globalization, particularly in an age of rampant digital connectivity. For example, exploring the complex dynamics of materiality and immateriality in ­music, David Novak has examined the unexpected revival of the analog audiocassette in the ­Japanese noise music scene of the early twenty-first century: Cassette tapes relocalize Noise by distinguishing interpersonal exchanges of physical media from the ubiquity of online access. The renewed emphasis on social copresence in independent music has strongly impacted the orientation of cassette exchange networks, which have shifted away from transnational connections to stress the reinvention of local scenes. (2013: 199)

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Despite their nostalgic attempt to relocalize and rematerialize this music, artists and fans of noise continue to share their music online, and Novak points out that doing so frees the music from its confinement to the “edges of circulation,” which had been intended to keep the music “underground.” The tension between practices that rely on music’s materiality (including face-to-face relationships between musicians and fans) and those that make music immaterial (and therefore facilitate its wider circulation) characterizes musical life in what the cultural critic Walter Benjamin famously called the “age of mechanical reproduction” ([1935] 2006).

Colonialism It is impossible to understand post-colonial theory without a working knowledge of colonial history. Many scholars, particularly those from post-colonial countries, view the European idea of modernity and the thought of Enlightenment philosophers such as René Descartes and David Hume as complicit in the colonial project.4 Certainly, the so-called “Age of Exploration” that preceded colonialism grew out of European ideas of science and reason, and made European colonialism possible on a global scale. This is not to say that no culture had ever colonized another before the development of European empires, which began in the 1500s. The Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Moghul, Khanate/Mongol, and Incan empires all colonized and dominated other ethnic and cultural groups. But the term “colonial” is rarely applied to the peoples controlled by such historic empires: generally, it refers to the experience of “the rest” being colonized by “the West” (which usually means Europe and, eventually, came to include the US).5 Modern European colonialism stretched across the entire globe, but its defining features included not just its geographical scope, but its cultural and social aims. Colonial powers were interested not merely with political and economic control, but also with religious and ideological domination. Their desire to bring “backward” people into modernity was perhaps best encapsulated by Rudyard Kipling’s infamous 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Such forms of colonization were distinct from the imperialism practiced by previous empires. Since Europeans represented their colonial project as a redemptive force that brought its subjects from the darkness of primitivism into the light of civilization (the terms dark and light, of course, had racial implications), it was rarely enough for the colonized to offer political and economic allegiance to the colonizer. Following then-current ideas in cultural evolutionism, which was the primary approach in anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century (e.g. Tylor 1871), the colonizers sought to “improve” the people that they colonized.6 In pursuit of this project, they brought biomedicine, European elite culture, the new idea of nation and national identity, Christianity, Western gender roles, the scientific worldview, and other ideas and practices to the colonies, seeking not just to change the colonized people’s political and economic situations but their very culture. As a result, European (and later, European and American) ideas about capital, science, class and status, art, and language were forced on colonized peoples, leading, for example, to the elevated status of British English in countries like Singapore, India, and Kenya, which continues to this day. Portugal and Spain were the first of the modern European empires, and in the fifteenth century, they ushered in what Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) famously called the “Modern World-system,” a network of planet-wide economic relationships that was the forerunner of today’s global economy. To this day, musics influenced by Portugal and Spain can be found throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas; their impact was strongest on the coasts because European countries were seafaring. After the 1588 destruction of the Spanish Armada, England became the preeminent European naval power and went on to build an overseas

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empire that covered almost a quarter of the earth, extending their dominion over millions of subordinated colonial subjects. Ever eager to challenge England, France established colonies in the Americas, the West Indies, Asia, and Africa, as did the Dutch in the East Indies and the Western Hemisphere. In the late 1800s, other European powers, such as Germany and Belgium, began to found colonies, and in 1898, after winning the Spanish-American War, the United States established its own overseas empire, which included Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In the early 1900s, Italy colonized Libya and then the horn of Africa. Throughout this period, colonies changed hands as the Europeans and Americans fought among themselves: following World War I, France seized Cameroon from the Germans, and in 1936, Italy’s Mussolini “liberated” Somalia from the British. Two main kinds of expansion characterized the European colonial project: extractive colonialism and settler colonialism. The majority of European and US-held colonies were of the extractive type; here, the colonizers appropriated material resources—often cash crops, minerals, or lumber—from the territories under their control. Most painfully, slaves were extracted as human cargo from the lands seized by the colonizers. In contrast, settler colonialism (e.g. in territories that were to become the United States, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, and New Zealand) brought migrant populations from the colonizing country and often other places as well. These settler populations generally took the best land for themselves, displacing and exterminating indigenous peoples. Both kinds of colonialism could involve large transfers of captive populations, either as slaves or indentured labor, in order to meet the demand for workers in extractive industries, such as rubber, sugar cane, or coffee plantations. Some of the most influential musics of the twentieth century were produced by descendants of African slaves brought to North America to work on cotton plantations (Gilroy 1995). African slaves were not the only victims of the mass displacements of populations under colonialism. For example, Manuel (2000) has documented a lesser-known musical tradition that stems from descendants of indentured Indian plantation laborers in the Caribbean (see also Manuel with Largey 2016).7

Post-colonialism and Decolonization The noun “post-coloniality” is primarily used to refer either to the state of having thrown off the colonizer’s direct political control or to the effects of such a condition on a group’s economy, psychology, culture, and social life. The adjective “post-colonial” is usually applied to cultures that have been subjects of direct colonial control, but it can sometimes be used to describe the situation of the colonizers themselves after the end of empire or to any culture from the period after World War II, which is when decolonization began to accelerate. It may seem strange to talk about a country that was never colonized as having a “post-colonial” period; however, the term is often used in this way because the effects of colonialism were never limited to those countries that were directly colonized. For example, Thailand was never colonized by a European power, but its history and national development were strongly influenced by France, Britain, and their surrounding Southeast Asian colonies (Tejasen and Luyt 2014). Like colonialism, the bureaucratic nation-state arose during the modern period of ­European history (see Anderson 1983; Gellner 2009; and particularly Hobsbawm 2012). This modern form of social organization was radically dissimilar from the feudal kingdoms and multi-ethnic empires that preceded it, and created conflicts on ever larger geographic scales, eventually leading to the two world wars. These wars were rightly called world wars, as a significant amount of military conflict took place outside of Europe. During both world wars but particularly in World War II, European colonizers forced the people in their colonies to fight in these conflicts, even though most colonial subjects had never seen Europe.

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Acute food shortages and starvation were common in the colonies and soon-to-be-former colonies. Faced with massive population losses (including a flu pandemic in 1919 that killed more people than World War I), destruction of property and infrastructure, economic decline, and political instability, most European colonial countries in the periods after the wars refocused their money and political will on their homelands.8 It was in this context that, between 1918 (when World War I ended) and 1965 (twenty years after the end of World War II), many colonized peoples successfully rebelled against the colonizers and formed nations of their own. This wave of decolonization was undoubtedly a positive development, as colonization had been brutal in myriad ways and the brutalizers were overthrown; however, post-coloniality was, and is, fraught with difficulties. Rejecting the cultures and infrastructure the colonizers had forced upon them, people in formerly colonized countries were left with the enormous task of building a new society from the remnants of their own, pre-colonial cultures and civilizations. Many had internalized Euro-American ideas of modernity and progress, which made it undesirable for them to return to their pre-colonial states. Nor was such a return possible, even if it was desired, because pre-colonial life had in many cases been partially or largely obliterated, and was forgotten or inaccurately remembered. Colonizers plundered the colonial lands’ natural resources, forcibly relocated colonized peoples, and arbitrarily determined national borders, making it difficult for these new nations, which were often impoverished, to create stable political and economic systems. Furthermore, Western values and aesthetics had been internalized by many educated elites, including an attitude of cultural exceptionalism that held their ethnic group as superior to others in their new countries. Even after colonial rule ended, many Europeans remained in these new nations, where they were among the wealthiest and most privileged people. Local elites who cooperated with colonial authorities, and therefore had a vested interest in maintaining at least some of the colonizers’ institutions, often remained in positions of authority. Many of them struggled to maintain their privileged positions, to the detriment of their nation and fellow citizens, and the legacy of colonialism continued in a wide variety of ways. Zimbabwe is a case in point. The country gained independence from the British Empire in 1980, comparatively late in the history of decolonization. Robert Mugabe, the country’s first prime minister and later its president, came to power promising to redistribute British farmland to native Zimbabweans. Under his regime, many British farms were dismantled and apportioned to the indigenous population. But because the British had hoarded the technology and much of the knowledge about modern farming, the native peoples had to learn to farm through trial and error, resulting in rampant starvation and poverty (which Mugabe and his friends and family were largely able to avoid).9 In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the end of the Cold War and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union, thus leaving the United States as the world’s sole superpower. This event was widely interpreted by elites and commercial media in North America, as well as other regions of the world, as a victory of capitalism over communism. With even mainland China opening its markets to foreign direct investments (while still claiming to be a communist state), elite and media discourses in Europe and the United States promoted as common sense the view that post-colonial nations had no economic alternative to global capitalism (see, for example, Fukuyama 1992). This rhetoric of capitalist triumphalism has been nearly constant in the mainstream media of the last three decades, with only brief interruptions during periods of acute economic crisis, such as the ones that began in 1997 and 2008, throwing world markets into disarray and creating tremendous misery. However, the ascendance of the global capitalist economy has not been uncontested in the political sphere. Left-wing leaders and political parties have achieved power and influence in parts of Latin America (e.g. Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela) and

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Europe (Podemos, the Spanish political party). Movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Green Party have been important in the US over the last decade or so, while massive street protests have broken out with increased frequency in Brazil, Greece, France, and other places. The same period has seen the rise of powerful reactionary movements, which constitute nationalist or fundamentalist backlashes to global integration; such movements tend to devolve into xenophobia, racism, and the scapegoating of immigrants, rather than constitute direct critiques of global capitalism. In Hungary, Poland, and the United States, this has resulted in dramatic political realignments. Through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and global trade regimes, Europe and the US have maintained their worldwide power and influence (see Harvey 2007). Based in economic rather than directly political and military means, this form of post-colonial domination isn’t identical to that of colonialism, and the contemporary system is not totalizing. However, the key point is that political decolonization did not end colonialism and that similar relations of power are maintained today by new methods. These forms of economic domination are at play not only in agriculture and heavy industry, but also in the culture industries. Most multi-national corporations that dominate media and entertainment are based in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Such corporations now exert enormous control over the music of the world (Bernstein et al. 2007), dominating a field where smaller national record labels once wielded far more influence (Wallis and Malm 1984).10

Major Concepts in Post-colonial Thought Post-colonial theory predates the literature on globalization by almost a decade, but ethnomusicologists started to respond to both theories at roughly the same time (and often without distinguishing between them).11 Many post-colonial theorists, including Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, write in an extremely difficult style. Some do so intentionally, arguing that ordinary English is too compromised by its status as a tool of the colonizer to be employed in a straightforward manner. For them, only the radical defamiliarization of language can succeed as a strategy for conveying counterhegemonic, anticolonial ideas. In this view, the very syntactic structure of the linguistic utterance betrays a grammar of conquest, a cultural logic of causality that is occidentalist (Western-centric) and ­imperialist—what Homi Bhabha (1992) terms the “sententious.” All of these scholars theorize the post-­colonial condition as one of anxious confinement, a state of confounding halflife in which the self is stymied and silenced, its very cohesion placed in perpetual doubt. The psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) could be considered as either the first post-­ colonial thinker or a crucial ancestor to the movement. In either case, it is hard to imagine the intellectual landscape of post-colonial studies without his influence.12 Born into a ­m iddle-class black family on the island of Martinique in the French Caribbean, Fanon received academic training in Lyon, France, where he attended lectures by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.13 He supported the Algerian War against the French (1954–1962) and, as a psychiatrist, tried to address the psychic effects of the war, particularly the use of torture, on both black Algerian soldiers and their white French torturers. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), which was based on his dissertation and rooted in psychoanalytic interpretation, and A Dying Colonialism (1967), which discusses the Algerian War against the French, he showed how colonialism created social, political, and psychological harm. In The Wretched of the Earth ([1963] 2004), he argued that colonialism is inherently unjust and that, because violence was the only language the colonizers understood, violent rebellion was the only way to move beyond colonialism. However, he also saw that such actions often perpetuated the injustices of colonialism, leaving the reader, and many subsequent

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revolutionaries, with an acute understanding of colonialism’s wrongs but little sense of how to move beyond colonial and post-colonial tragedy in a successful manner. The major post-colonial thinkers have not been from European metropolitan backgrounds, though many received academic training in European metropoles and come from upper-class families. This seems to be one of the primary differences between post-­colonial studies and globalization studies: post-colonial scholars tend to be from post-colonial countries or, occasionally, as in the case of Paul Gilroy (1987, 1995, 2007), from diasporic communities within the colonial power itself.14 In contrast, globalization scholars tend to be from Europe or North America. Another important difference is that post-colonial thinkers usually hail from the discipline of literary studies, while globalization scholars are usually from the social sciences, particularly anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology. The ideas of modernity and progress are so celebrated in the European and American academies that it can be difficult for thinkers from colonizer backgrounds to truly question the colonial experience. People who grow up in colonial, post-colonial, or marginalized racial contexts, however, have no such luxury. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said (1935–2003) was trained in literature at Princeton and Harvard, and became a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His two major works, Orientalism (1978) and the collection of essays Culture and Imperialism (1993), mark the beginnings of post-colonial critique. When considering Orientalism, it is important to realize that Americans and Europeans mean different things when they use the term “Oriental.” For most Americans, “Oriental” refers to East Asian cultures, primarily China, Japan, and Korea. In Europe, “the Orient” refers to what North Americans call “the Middle East” or, to use a current academic phrase, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Even today, Oriental Studies programs in Europe take the MENA countries as their focus. Since Said was initially educated in England, his book’s title refers to the MENA countries and not East Asia, although some of the stereotypes he discusses apply to both regions. In Orientalism, Said argues that European scholarly work about the MENA countries is based in romantic and imperial stereotypes of the Orient as exotic and mysterious, and that such writings tell us more about the West’s view of itself than about any cultural, political, ideological, or religious realities in the MENA countries themselves. Analyzing hundreds of years of intellectual history, Orientalism uses post-structuralist theory to discuss the influence of literary images of the Middle East on both colonizers and colonized. (On post-structuralism, see Sugarman [this volume].) That these phantasmagoric stereotypes also inform Americans’ views of the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam is highly significant given the US’s post-World War II political and military activity in the MENA region. As a public intellectual, Said came into conflict with various (mainly American) scholars, most famously the historian Bernard Lewis (see Said 1981, 1997; Said and Grabar 1982; Lewis 1982, 1993). Said argued that the views that many American scholars hold of the MENA countries, Arabs, and Islam were orientalist, and therefore their diagnoses of perceived Middle Eastern social pathologies underestimated the role of Western neo-colonial aggression. According to Said, European scholars understood Europe and the Middle East in terms of binary oppositions that characterize Europeans as masculine, advanced or modern, scientific or rational, secular, and strong; in contrast, they characterized people from the Orient as feminine, backwards or traditional, irrational, religious, and weak. Said argues that, as a result of Euro-American economic, military, and political power, MENA peoples internalized this view, though often without being consciously aware that they had done so. This is an important idea in post-colonial studies: colonized people, even people in countries that had been but are no longer colonized, have often internalized the colonizer’s racism, colonial perspectives, and Euro-American triumphalism. While Said himself appears not to

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have had much interest in ethnomusicology (his writings on music [e.g. 1991] are entirely concerned with the Western art tradition), his ideas have been extremely influential on our discipline. The most significant feminist thinker in post-colonial studies is the Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942). She received her PhD in comparative literature from Cornell University, where she studied with literary critic and theorist Paul de Man. Later, she met philosopher Jacques Derrida while she was in the process of writing the introduction to her translation of his book Of Grammatology ([1967] 1976), and French post-structuralism has been important to her thought.15 Spivak’s best known short work is the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), which looks at British colonial and post-colonial responses to suttee, the Hindu funerary practice in which a widow would immolate herself on the funeral pyre of her late husband. Spivak’s answer to the essay’s titular question seems to be “no,” particularly when one reads the article’s concluding personal anecdote. In the essay, she writes movingly about a young woman (a relative) who hanged herself in 1926. Spivak explains that the young woman had been involved in the struggle against British colonialism and was given an assassination assignment by her superiors in the movement. She decided she couldn’t bring herself to carry out the assassination and chose to kill herself instead. She knew that, as a woman, her suicide would not be interpreted as a political statement against the British, but as a response to some aspect of her relationships to the men in her life (father, brothers, and potential or actual lovers). The young woman waited until she was menstruating to hang herself because doing so would make clear that her suicide was not the result of an unwanted pregnancy, and Spivak concludes the narrative by describing her family members’ discussion of the young woman’s death. Contrary to her wishes, they speculated that her suicide must have been motivated by unrequited love or a fear of dishonoring her father. Though she had “spoken” quite eloquently by waiting to kill herself until she was menstruating, even her family members had assumed that her speech had not been political. Spivak reminds us that the young woman came from a privileged, upper-caste background and was not herself subaltern, but that even her speech was forgotten and willfully reinterpreted in order to minimize her agency. The implication is that the truly subaltern cannot speak, and if they were able to do so, society would neither listen nor understand. Among Spivak’s most important concepts is “strategic essentialism” (1996). To say that a given representation of a social group is “essentialist” is to say that that representation depicts the group as having fixed characteristics and sharp boundaries, ones that exist independently of history and culture. The term is almost always used in a pejorative sense, and critiques of essentialism are central to post-structuralism. In a complex, dialectical argument, Spivak criticizes essentialist, affirmative construction of identity categories such as “woman” or “third world,” but she argues that such categories can be provisionally mobilized in political struggle as rallying points for coalitions fighting for social justice.16 Thus, in Spivak’s thinking, French, post-structuralist anti-essentialism ultimately shares space with an activist tradition of struggle bequeathed by Fanon and other anti-colonial thinkers. Related ideas are developed in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), the title of which is a reference to philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason. Here, Spivak argues that European thinkers like Kant and H ­ egel viewed non-­ Europeans (when they viewed them at all, which was seldom) as less than human, illustrating the utter failure of Western humanism that her interventions had long sought to expose. Her radical skepticism helped pave the way for a reconsideration of E ­ urocentric narratives of unilinear progress toward a singular modernity (e.g. Goankar 1999). In spite of her centrality to post-colonial studies, Spivak is uncomfortable with being pigeonholed as a post-colonial intellectual. In the Critique, she discusses her concerns with

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essentialist readings of post-colonial theory and refuses to completely accept the label “post-colonial” to describe her work, arguing instead that her ideas are too subtle and complex to be so conveniently labeled. (Indeed, she would probably feel that any brief summary of her ideas is woefully inadequate, including this one.) Certainly all the thinkers discussed in this section are complex and draw on numerous intellectual sources, not just post-structuralists like Derrida but also scholars associated with psychoanalysis, Marxism, phenomenology, and critical studies of nation, gender, and race. Like Said, who was one of his most important influences, the Indian scholar Homi Bhabha (b. 1949) also received his credentials in the West—in this case, from Oxford, where he studied literature. Bhabha’s scholarship shows how the colonized can challenge the colonizer, both directly and indirectly, and emphasizes that the colonial encounter entails a two-way exchange, though the two never meet on equal ground. He doesn’t argue that such encounters are easy, nor that it is easy for outsiders to detect the challenges that colonized peoples present to their colonizers. But in allowing for the possibility of challenge and exchange, Bhabha acknowledges that the colonized have and can express agency, desires, perspectives, and expectations. A central idea in Bhabha’s work is the notion of the “Third Space,” an expression that is usually capitalized (Bhabha [1988] 2006). Understood as a zone of linguistic encounter, the term refers to a domain opened up by the impossibility of perfect communication between two or more interlocutors. The Third Space is a zone of possibilities; interlocutors can avail themselves of this space in many ways, turning conversation to their advantage by capitalizing on others’ incomplete understanding of their words. The dynamics of the Third Space are particularly useful for disenfranchised peoples, who can use devices like code-switching and double-voiced utterances to make political criticisms without arousing the ire of those in power ([1988] 2006). We are reminded here of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia (1982), the idea that any given text offers a multiplicity of differently inflected voices (see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume). Closely related to the notion of the Third Space is Bhabha’s understanding of hybridity ([1994] 2004). Before Bhabha, the term hybridity was often used in a casual, politically neutral sense to refer to the combination of tropes or ideas from two or more cultures in a single text or tradition. For Bhabha and the scholars allied with him, this notion operates quite differently. As cultural studies scholar Ien Ang explains, For postcolonial cultural theorists [including Bhabha] … hybridity has an explicitly political purchase. They see the hybrid as a critical force that undermines or subverts, from inside out, dominant formations through the interstitial insinuation of the ‘different,’ the ‘other,’ or the marginalized into the very fabric of the dominant. (2001: 198) Hybridity is therefore not merely a mixture of cultures (though it is that), but it also has “interrogative effects” (Ang 2001: 198). that upset the hierarchical relations between colonizer and colonized. Relating his politicized notion of hybridity to his formulation of the Third Space, Bhabha writes that, It is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this ‘Third Space,’ we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves. ([1988] 2006: 157) Bhabha’s ideas have been highly influential, particularly his notion of hybridity as a site of agency for the colonized subject, which is a prevalent theme in post-colonial studies, globalization scholarship, and ethnomusicology.

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The post-colonial condition is extraordinarily complex. Scholars must therefore be careful neither to minimize the horrors of colonialism nor to romanticize the colonized by ignoring the complicity of local elites in colonialism or neglecting the tangled internal power relations among the diverse groups in areas that were colonized. Further, it is important to emphasize that the real-world histories of colonization and post-colonialism vary significantly from region to region and country to country. For example, most of Central and South America was colonized by the Spanish or Portuguese. Many of the wars in this region against the European colonial powers were fought in the early or mid-1800s, and, as a result, the colonies here broke away from their colonizers much earlier than those in Africa and Asia. Although Central and South American countries are clearly post-colonial in that they were once colonized and are now mostly not, scholars today less frequently include the Americas in discussions of post-coloniality. Since the 1960s, critically engaged scholarship has sought to acknowledge the diversity of experiences had by women, non-­cisgender people, the disabled, the poor, the rural, racial or religious minorities, and members of other marginalized groups. Hence, assuming that there is one post-colonial experience is as problematic as assuming that there is one experience of being gendered female, one experience of disability, or one experience of racialization. Those who research post-colonial peoples must avoid the essentialist trap of homogenizing the experiences of the colonized and ignoring the unique ways in which European domination has been challenged and resisted in different regions and historical periods. Moreover, ­ ation-states has the experience of colonization for indigenous minorities in post-colonial n often been quite distinct from the experiences of the rest of the population. This has led to an emerging field of indigenous studies (see, for example, Andersen and O’Brien 2017), which has focused on the cultures and experiences of “Fourth World” peoples, a category that also includes indigenous minorities in rich countries like the US, Canada, Australia, Finland, Sweden, and Japan. Emphasizing the distinctive ways in which indigenous peoples address European notions of progress, Beverley Diamond and her colleagues point out that “Indigenous modernities often differ from the ‘developmentalist’ narratives of ‘the West’ and emphasize the fragmentation, deterritorialization, and struggles for reclamation that are parts of indigenous experience in most parts of the world” (2012: 2). If the literature on post-colonialism and indigeneity has developed new perspectives on politics and culture and raised important questions, the work on globalization has advanced a related set of challenges.

Globalization and Colonialism As the significance of geographical distance and boundaries of all sorts continues to wane, scholars struggle to make sense of an increasingly interconnected globe with ubiquitous international brands, a media-saturated environment of relentless sensory bombardment, new cultural fusions, and pervasive social disruption. In this daunting context, music plays a central role. New media platforms invariably have musical applications, which often become their most important features. Ethnomusicologists have taken a variety of positions on how their discipline fits into the new global order and, as a result, have reconsidered the relationship between music and its social base, the nature of global media industries, and the role of media in everyday life (Stokes 2004). Arjun Appadurai (1990) has famously asserted that contemporary cultural anthropologists need to understand translocal sociocultural forces, such as the mass media and global immigration, and address them in their research. Advancements in communications and transportation technologies, he argues, have made the rapid dissemination of culture a characteristic feature of the contemporary world. Speaking directly to this issue, his widely

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cited article “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” (1990) identifies five “-scapes” that are relatively autonomous from one another: “(a) ethnoscapes; (b) media­ scapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) financescapes; and (e) ideoscapes” (6–7). These -scapes map, respectively, the global distribution of ethnic populations, media texts, technologies, economic investments, and ideologies. More than simply drawing attention to the translocal dynamics of culture, Appadurai advocates a radical rethinking of the conventional categories of center and periphery, suggesting that they are multiple, relational, shifting, and situationally determined. The world he presents is unruly and unmoored, but also one of unrealized possibilities. In his 1996 book Modernity at Large, Appadurai develops this idea by arguing that to understand even the most seemingly pragmatic dimensions of globalization, such as demographics and economics, one must take into account elements of human experience that had, in the past, been relegated to expressive culture. For example, discussing (voluntary) immigration in the globalized world, he writes that: [o]rdinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation…. More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life. (5–6) The most influential aspects of Appadurai’s work have been the concept of the mediascape and the idea that, under contemporary social conditions, cultural forms can flow freely around the globe. The ethnomusicologist René T. A. Lysloff characterizes Appadurai’s view in this way: “[Globalization] is a movement so complex in its inter-relationships, and so massive in its membership of individuals and groups, that we can only visualize it as the topography of constantly shifting conceptual landscapes” (2016: 485). Like many in our field, Lysloff finds this cartographic view helpful as a starting point for his work, which is centered on music in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, but he ultimately concludes that it is unsatisfactory for dealing with the musical practices of situated, individual artists (about which, more below). Subsequent theorists in anthropology have attempted to bring some order to ­Appadurai’s vertiginous depictions. For example, in contrast to Appadurai’s typology of -scapes, the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (1992) proposes an analytic scheme for understanding ­g lobalization that identifies four “frameworks of flow”: everyday “forms of life,” the state, the market, and social movements. For Hannerz, “forms of life” exist in the realm of ­face-to-face interactions, while “the state” channels official discourse through institutions, such as public schools and government-owned media. The market framework includes everything that transpires in the world of commerce and commodities, and is dictated by economic forces; social movements refers to grassroots organizations that transcend local collectivities. These frameworks channel the flow of culture, attest to the presence of stable patterns within the seeming chaos of globalization, and can be opened to empirical investigation. Appadurai’s manifesto of cultural globalization was liberating for scholars who felt constrained by ethnography’s emphasis on the local (e.g. Clifford 1997), but it was frustrating for others, who argued that it underestimated the ways in which economic forces decisively shape society and culture. For example, emphasizing the continuity between the period of direct European colonialism and present-day neoliberal capitalism, many Marxist thinkers have questioned the idea that there is anything really new about globalization. In this vein,

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Timothy Taylor, who represents a thoughtful middle position on this topic, writes that “the globe is not interconnected for the first time in our era of globalization, but interconnected in new ways, though with old ideologies (about authenticity, as well as various forms of racism and xenophobia) remaining remarkably resilient” (2017: 5). This issue also plays out in considerations of the recent past. Western scholars often question the utility of differentiating the so-called “late capitalism” of the 1980s and 1990s from twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism, since both types of capitalism result from the same macroeconomic forces of financial deregulation, corporate consolidation, and the increased cost efficiencies that come from automation and the exploitation of new sources of cheap l­abor (Harvey 2007; for more on the notions of late and neoliberal capitalism, see Manuel, this volume). While it is arguable that the last four decades have not held major social and economic changes for the developed world, they have been transformative in developing countries, radically reshaping the urban landscape in places like Nairobi, Mumbai, Jakarta, Shanghai, and Hong Kong (see, for example, Mathews 2011). Megamalls, global fast-food franchises, and skyscrapers rose up where there were once shantytowns and slums; digital technologies like smartphones, providers of mere convenience in rich countries, became game changers for those who would otherwise not have access to telephones, bank accounts, or the Internet; and life opportunities were fundamentally altered for millions of people, including the very poor.17 While the literature on globalization is divided between, on the one hand, those who follow Appadurai and celebrate its hybridizing possibilities, democratizing potential, and encouragement of grassroots creativity, and, on the other, those who regard it as wholly synonymous with neoliberal capitalism and Euro-American imperialism, these perspectives are not totally dissimilar. Both interpretations of globalization share a concern with structure and agency, and both seek to understand the possibilities for social actors to negotiate unequal power relations. Both approaches view the global-local encounter as an asymmetrical exchange. What separates them is their understanding of the nature of that exchange, as the former places a great deal more value on what the subordinate party gains.18 Whether or not countries have a history of colonization, or indeed were colonizers themselves, many people around the world feel like they are on the receiving end of globalization, which is often described as the invasion of an American (or occasionally ­European) style of business and popular culture. It is, however, dangerous to conflate colonialism and globalization, which are two very different historical processes. Indeed, to equate the European colonialism that dominated the planet before World War II with contemporary globalization is to commit academic malpractice. Unlike the political domination of the period of direct European colonialism, which was imposed through obvious and brutal means, the contemporary globalization of culture is coercive in more subtle ways. Further, one must recognize the difference between the global flow of cultural forms themselves and the coercive economic forces that pave the way for them. Describing such forces, cultural sociologist John Tomlinson has observed that, [t]he context of consumer culture is the structural context of urban, industrial capitalist modernity, and this is not something any individual ‘buys.’ It is not even something which it is plausible to think of a society fully ‘opting for’ in the sense of taking considered communal decisions about: short-term economic considerations will generally force the hand of Third World governments towards programmes of ‘modernisation.’ (1991: 133–34) In other words, one must distinguish between, on the one hand, the globalization of culture, and, on the other, the means through which coercive relations of economic dependency are

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maintained. Acknowledging the different historical processes at work and understanding the unique forms of power that each entails are essential for any nuanced analysis. In recent years, ethnomusicologists have taken up the challenge of historicizing their fieldsites and understanding how those sites were shaped by a long series of often coercive encounters with cultural others. For example, Julia Byl’s remarkable study of music among the Toba Batak ethnic group of Sumatra reveals a convoluted history of cross-cultural encounters dating back to ancient times (2014). Her book stands as one of the few ethnomusicological monographs of a vernacular (non-court-based) music culture with such an expansive geo-temporal scope. Likewise, Aurality (2014), Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s analysis of nineteenth-century Colombian “sound-worlds” (see also Meizel and Daughtry, this volume), is another exemplary work of historical ethnomusicology in a fraught, colonized setting. Amanda Weidman (2006) details the tangled colonial and post-colonial history of the music that became the South Indian classical tradition, while Max Katz’s 2017 ­Lineage of Loss: Counter-narratives of North Indian Music centers on a gharana (musical lineage) that did not conform to the ideological and ethno-religious priorities of a nationalizing, post-colonial Indian state, and therefore faded from view, while other gharanas achieved international prominence. Sumarsam’s pathbreaking publications (1995, 2013, 2014) trace the colonial and post-colonial history of Javanese gamelan, a subject that had long been elided by presentist ethnomusicological accounts. His important research supports the view that the celebrated gamelan traditions of Central Java were not autochthonous, but rather a product of a long history of exchanges with peripheral regions of Java, which are now considered by the Central Javanese to be musically unsophisticated and uncouth. Sumarsam’s work also reveals the pivotal influence of Dutch colonialism and Western scholarship on the development of gamelan traditions. Timothy Taylor remains one of the most astute writers on music from a historical materialist perspective. He has traced the saga of Western musical appropriations from the early modern period to the media-saturated present era (2007), and, in recent works, investigated current musical practices under the regime of global neoliberal capitalism (2016, 2017)—what Gilroy has called the onset of “commercial planetarization” (2007: 274). Veit ­Erlmann combines post-colonial and globalization theories in a subtle critique of the tendency within ethnomusicology to regard the “local” as a site of authentic resistance. “Remapping the global village,” he writes, … does not only mean that we have to persist in our attempts to problematize the politics of ethnicity, nationalism and Western cultural hegemony. We also need to get a better understanding of the ways in which counterforces—the politics and culture of local communities and movements—are derivative of the very discourses they seek to interrogate. (1998: 20) These ideas are developed in Erlmann’s Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination (1999), where he details the complex history of transatlantic interactions that gave rise to the music genres of contemporary South Africa. By contrast, other ethnomusicologists have researched affect-laden, often sorrowful musics of former imperial powers, such as Turkey (Gill 2017) and Portugal (Gray 2013). In sum, a salutary effect of ethnomusicology’s encounter with post-colonial and globalization studies has been that our ethnographies are now more apt to be haunted by the specter of history. That is to say, they contain the awareness that all observable musical practice results from concrete, often violent histories of unequal exchange. The ethnomusicology of post-coloniality and globalization has its own history, a topic to which we now turn.

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Ethnomusicology, Technology, the Post-colonial Condition, and Globalization If the new scholarship on post-colonialism and globalization encouraged ethnomusicologists to historicize the musics and cultures they study, it also motivated them to consider the technological and commercial aspects of music production. Their first forays into these areas were largely condemnatory. Ethnomusicologists had long been suspicious of the mass media and market forces, and much of their work was inspired by Marx’s ideas about the capitalist exploitation of labor and the Frankfurt School’s Marxist critique of the culture industry. The withering denunciation of popular music produced by Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno, which combined Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism with unadulterated Eurocentric elitism, was particularly influential here. (On the Frankfurt School, see Manuel [this volume].)19 Many of the early works in the ethnomusicology of globalization focused on the “commercial pseudo-genre” (Krüger Bridge 2018: 11) of “world music.” While this term had been used in college classrooms since the 1960s (Nettl 2010: 34), the 1980s and 1990s saw the music industry adopt this expression as a category for marketing non-Western musics to audiences in the US and Europe.20 Exploring this topic, studies by scholars such as Steven Feld (1988) and Timothy Taylor (1997) revealed how artists and labels from the rich world curate, commodify, and exploit non-­Western musics and musicians in ways analogous to other practices of post-colonial economic domination; here, the performer’s labor is enlisted in the capitalist production of globally circulating sonic commodities. Other studies showed how first-world artists use digital sampling (Feld 1996, 2000; Guy 2002) and copyright law (Meintjes 1990) to dispossess musical properties from their indigenous owners, while record labels potentially alienate non-Western performers from their art through practices such as promotion, studio production, and packaging, to render them more attractive to affluent Western consumers (Whitmore 2016). In this context, Andrew McGraw’s work illustrates how the consumer preferences of foreign listeners can strike those from the musicians’ country of origin as quaint, puzzling, or even off-putting (2016). While early studies were successful in identifying exploitative music industry practices, this work was not without its difficulties. For example, the initial wave of ethnomusicological critics of world music rarely acknowledged their own position as first-world scholars operating within systems of neo-colonial cultural exchange—a position that today would likely be seen as untenable. In addition, early ethnomusicological critiques tended to overlook the subversive and unsettling possibilities that “world music” has had when deployed by subaltern actors (White 2012). Exploring this dynamic, a recent article by Lysloff shows the differing ways in which Sapto Raharjo and Venzha Christiawan, two composers from Jogjakarta, Indonesia, have made use of this category. For them, Lysloff writes, … world music has become what might be called worlding music. Sapto, on the one hand, brought contemporary gamelan music to the world while Venzha, on the other, continues to bring the world of new media arts to Jogja (and Indonesia). Through the efforts of artists like Sapto and Venzha, Jogjakarta is becoming a major center for contemporary international arts... (2016: 503) Finally, the analogies between music and the natural resources plundered by colonizers are problematic. Music is a renewable resource. It cannot be “stolen” without first being made into a commodity. Nonetheless, despite the difficulties that exist in the older ethnomusicological literature, the painful topic of cultural appropriation by Western music producers

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remains all too salient today, as illustrated by a recent collection of essays on the hipster-­ imperialist label Sublime Frequencies (Veal and Kim 2016). If the 1990s scholarship on world music was largely critical, more contemporary studies of popular musics in the global south have revealed how market forces can both unleash and inhibit grassroots creativity (Krüger Bridge 2018; see also Ramnarine 2003 and Sharp 2014).21 Ethnomusicologists have drawn on the theories of global flows and frameworks of flow to produce grounded ethnographic studies of circulating musical artifacts, their creators, distributors, and end users. These studies show how technological advances, which are generally the result of market forces, can lead to creative innovation, particularly when artists customize technology to achieve aesthetically relevant ends (Greene and Porcello 2005). Technology can even be used to make music sound more “traditional” (Bilby 1995; Meintjes 2003; Wallach 2005b). Globalization theory has helped ethnomusicologists reimagine not only the tools of music making, but also its scale. Studies exploring this topic reveal that the ascendance of globally circulating musical forms does not render local spaces or local cultures irrelevant, and they also demonstrate the many varieties of exchange relations that exist in the global musical economy. My (Wallach’s) work has shown how Indonesian artists and producers use flows of technology, capital, and music to forge new hybrid musical compositions (Wallach 2005b, 2008, 2011). These new hybrids then circulate throughout the nation and help to define generational identity, in turn, giving rise to newer amalgamations.22 The impact of global flows could be perceived at the grassroots level, where popular music was performed, listened to, or played in the background in a variety of cultural spaces, from street corners to university campuses to public buses. In the mid-1990s, global mass media outlets like MTV had a dramatic influence on Indonesian mediascapes (Harnish 2005; Luvaas 2013). This had a range of unforeseen consequences, including the re-politicization of a segment of Indonesian middle-class youth, who were inspired by American groups like Public E ­ nemy and Rage Against the Machine (see Wallach 2005a). Two decades later, domestic bands like Navicula and Seringai perfected their own combinations of global rock influences and intervened in local and national politics, challenging environmental destruction, political corruption, and religious extremism (see Moore 2013). Related processes can be found in Gavin Steingo’s work on the South African popular music genre kwaito. In Kwaito’s Promise (2016), Steingo visits a Soweto township neighborhood, upscale cafes, downhome barbecue joints, and shebeens (informal drinking establishments)—all nodes in a vast network of circulation within greater Johannesburg that hooks into global circuits of music production and distribution. Steingo shows how these circuits allow kwaito to reach DJs and fans all over Africa and the world. In a rich analysis, Steingo observes the constraints and “affordances” of digital, multi-track technology on kwaito production and shows how many of kwaito’s creative practices are governed by the rules of gift exchange and mutual obligation characteristic of township life, rather than by the logic of calculated capitalist transactions. For example, computer files are freely passed around township communities, with different musicians adding their own instrumental and vocal tracks to the work in progress. As in the Indonesian context, globalization perpetuates rather than erases local practices. Mobile Musics and the Sounds of Encounter When musical sounds globalize, they tend to do so in discrete packets, and empirical r­ esearch has established the importance of genres in musical globalization. Music does not globalize as pure sound, these studies show, but as sounds bundled with images and meanings. In this context, genre is perhaps the most important “metacultural construct”

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(Urban 2001; Wallach 2008) for organizing the flow of musical sound (see also ­Beaster-Jones, this volume).23 One of the first edited books to discuss the importance of genre in the globalization of music was Lise Waxer’s Situating Salsa (2002). Waxer’s volume identifies the cultural issues at the center of salsa’s status as a genre: it is a Puerto Rican music with roots in Cuba, one that is best understood not as an inventory of formal musical traits, but rather as an evolving discourse about the very existence and boundaries of the genre itself. In her introduction, Waxer offers a useful taxonomy for mapping the scale of a genre’s circulation: local (confined to an area smaller than the nation), national (within a nation-state), transnational (within a multinational region, such as Latin America), and global (across the world, transcontinental).24 In subsequent chapters, the contributors to Situating Salsa discuss the music’s evolution and expansion as it developed at these various levels, and the book shows how salsa increased its reach beyond the transnational space of Latin America and its North American diaspora to include London and Japan, thus emerging as a genuinely global genre.25 Scholarly investigations into the global dimensions of music genres have examined a wide range of musics, including heavy metal (Wallach, Berger, and Greene 2011; ­Clinton and Wallach 2016), jazz (Atkins 2001, 2003; Feld 2012), punk (Dunn 2016; Greene 2016), reggae (Sterling 2010), and reggaetón (Rivera et al. 2009). The global audiences for ­nation-identified genres such as J-Pop ( Japanese popular music; Mori 2014), K-Pop (Korean popular music; Marinescu 2014), and Bollywood (Indian film music; Gopal and Moorti 2008) have also been explored. The genre that is most commonly investigated in terms of globalization is hip-hop, which emerged in African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in New York City in the 1970s and went on to revolutionize music on a global scale (e.g. Mitchell 2001; Perullo and Fenn 2003; Condry 2006; Charry 2012; McDonald 2013; Helbig 2014; Miszczynski and Helbig 2017). This musical style has been adapted as a voice of protest by marginalized youth from Winnipeg to Auckland, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Moscow, and beyond. As Milosz Miszczynski and Adriana Helbig explain in their collection of essays on hip-hop in Eastern Europe, “In a post-socialist society marred by violence, police corruption, poverty, and instability, hip hop offered not only a language to voice these experiences, but also a sense of strength that such realities could, in some way, be transcended” (2017: 2). Hip-hop has also radically transformed the sound and production techniques of other popular musics across the world. Simultaneously an “underground” and a “mainstream” genre, it has left few corners of the globe untouched. Hip-hop’s near-universal appeal is unusual. Most popular music genres flourish in some places but not others, and understanding why a given genre takes root in particular contexts is an important topic. In most cases, pre-existing cultural affinities link audiences with specific globalized popular music styles. For example, the chapter by Kei Kawano and Shuhei Hosokawa in Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (2011) argues that metal’s appeal in Japan is based on the music’s warrior ethos and the Japanese view that metal emphasizes kata (disciplined pattern), classicism, intellectualism, and stoicism (themes prevalent in Japanese culture), as well as Japan’s long-standing enthusiasm for Western classical music.26 The book’s chapters on metal in Latin America (Avelar 2011) and Southeast Asia (Wallach 2011) illustrate how the music’s defiance against unjust authority, ethos of creative self-reliance, and gregarious sociality resonate with youthful audiences that feel disenfranchised by the forces of modernity, industrialization, and political upheaval. Such cultural affinities are behind the success or failure of imported cultural forms the world over, yet they tend to be overlooked in deterministic, top-down theories of globalization. Ethnomusicological studies of underground music scenes have corroborated findings by scholars in other fields, which show that scene involvement is motivated by factors from every level of social scale, from narrowly local concerns, to national politics, to transnational

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cultural trends (see, for example, Condry 2006; Baulch 2007; Olson 2017). Not only do genres in post-colonial countries develop along unique trajectories, they sometimes play conspicuous roles in local politics, in some cases with serious consequences. On the 1980s punk scene in Lima, Peru, anthropologist Shane Greene writes: Faced with a war over Peru’s past and future… Lima’s punk revolution really began as an act to denounce violence and express a position for life. Positioned ambiguously in relation to the revolutionary proposals of the Marxist subversives, anarchistically antagonistic to the state but therefore also in opposition to the Maoists’ central party mandates, the subtes [underground scenesters] ended the decade at substantial risk of political death. (2016: 35) According to Greene, the transgressive, spectacular punk rock movement in Lima provided youth with an alternative, on the one hand, to the revolutionary dogma of the Shining Path guerillas (and their ardent university-student sympathizers) and, on the other, to the ham-fisted, totalitarian Peruvian state. The process by which punk music and culture first reached Peru is an example of what I (Wallach 2014) have called “indieglobalization,” the worldwide circulation of cultural artifacts via informal networks of enthusiasts motivated more by cultural values and aesthetics than by profits. The ethnomusicology of genre (indie)globalization is still developing, as new and unforeseen formations emerge, from Finnish folk metal (Marjenin 2014) to the regional Indonesian popular music dangdut koplo (Weintraub 2013). Technologically aided musical experimentations will continue to meet the need of emergent communities to cohere around shared values and aesthetics. Of course, it isn’t only genres and recordings that flow across national borders. The ­contemporary form of globalization has also led to unprecedented movements of peoples, and ethnomusicologists have explored this topic in myriad ways. Su Zheng, for example, has written about musical developments in the Chinese American community that range from traditional opera to ethnic fusion genres (2010), and Deborah Wong’s 2004 book Speak it Louder focuses in part on Asian American immigrant performers and communities throughout ­ ietnamese ­A mericans the US, including Cambodian Americans in South Philadelphia and V in Southern California. Other ethnomusicologists have made exemplary performers the main focus of their work. Sarah Morelli (2016) has described how the dance virtuoso Pandit Chitresh Das established a distinctive school of kathak dance in the San ­Francisco Bay Area, far from its North Indian ancestral homeland, while Daniel Reed’s aforementioned study (2016) recounts the circuitous paths of four dancers from Côte d­ ’Ivoire living in diasporic communities in the United States. James Revell Carr (2014) has taken a different tack; his landmark ethnographic and historical study of Hawaiian music, colonialism, and maritime commerce explores how songs themselves travel along with people. The latest generation of ethnomusicologists is unencumbered by a static, overly unified vision of culture, and their work reveals new dynamics in the politics of music and everyday life. Stephanie Jackson (2016) investigates music and ritual in the “double diaspora” of Indo-Guyanese immigrants of Tamil descent living in Queens, New York. Oliver Y. Shao (2016) examines the musical life of Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp, where the mostly Somali inhabitants are highly restricted in their movements, have virtually no ability to seek livelihoods, and are vulnerable to extortion and exploitation at the hands of camp personnel. He writes: During my research, my background as a trained ethnomusicologist with a focus on ­A frican musics made me attentive to the social resources that Kakuma’s refugees

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deployed in a humanitarian system in which they were often treated as dependent victims requiring social and material assistance from external actors, or objects of threat requiring surveillance and control. I learned that Kakuma’s residents continually sought to advance their positions in life as they used their music, dance, and rituals to create social meaning, constitute social spaces, claim their rights, and forge senses of belonging, as part of, and in excess to, their subjection to humanitarian and state-­induced structural inequality. (109) Shao’s work makes clear the ever-present reality of surveillance and control that exists in all fieldsites (even seemingly benign ones), as well as the will to make music that characterizes so many of even the most aggrieved. Critics of ethnomusicology claim that the epistemological crisis catalyzed by post-­ colonial theory and globalization has not been taken seriously enough in our discipline. For example, music scholar Andy Nercessian (2002) implores ethnomusicologists to re-examine their basic assumptions regarding musical meaning and value, arguing that globalization renders all musics fundamentally “polysemic” and unmoored from singular authoritative interpretations. He insists that ethnomusicologists no longer need to privilege the “emic” because no one currently devalues the musics they study in favor of Western art music. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Most music departments in North America are still dominated by performers and scholars of Western art music, and that tradition still has the most prestige and visibility in the Western academy. Perspectives like those of Nercessian result from a view of globalization that overlooks its uneven and unjust character, and fails to acknowledge the persistence of colonial thinking in the contemporary world. Like globalization itself, the development of a critical ethnomusicology is an uneven and incomplete project, but one of the most encouraging developments in the field is the resurgence of interest, particularly among students and younger faculty, in the notion of “decolonizing” the discipline (e.g. Lovesey 2017; for an older example, see Roseman 2000). At the time of this writing, it is too soon to tell what will come of these initiatives, but it is clear that ethnomusicologists can no longer sidestep the roles played by power, history, media, and mobility in the musics they research.

Conclusions Once a comfortably colonial discipline, ethnomusicology has had to contend with serious challenges to its legitimacy, both its focus on small-scale social groups and its colonial forms of knowledge production. Developing nuanced understandings of global flows, ethnomusicologists have addressed the former far more effectively than the latter. It is possible to view ethnomusicology’s intense, fruitful, often fraught engagements with theories of post-­ colonialism and globalization as responses to developments in the Western academy, but it is perhaps more appropriate to link them to a growing attentiveness to world geopolitical realignments.27 If the critique of Western knowledge production has not led in North America to the mass hiring of ethnomusicologists from the global south, it has at least led to increased awareness of the situatedness of all knowledge.28 And if the literature on globalization has highlighted the fragile provisionality of the local, it has, paradoxically, revealed as well the considerable value of classic ethnomusicological fieldwork in illuminating lived experience within contemporary mediascapes. Ethnomusicologists have drawn on post-colonial theory to understand the unequal power relationships that exist between research participants and scholars, but it is equally important to understand the ways in which post-colonial dynamics play out in the classroom and other

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sites within the academy. Recently, we had the opportunity to co-teach an ethnomusicology graduate seminar with students from Africa and Asia: three from Kenya, two from China, and one each from the Philippines, South Korea, and Tunisia. (Besides the two of us, there was also one other American in the class.) In the course, we assigned recent publications in ethnomusicology, mostly ethnographies, primarily written by scholars based in the United States. The students noticed certain recurrent shortcomings in these writings. Authors consistently ignored organized religion and spiritual matters more generally, the students said. They felt that the ethnographers exhibited a profound discomfort with emotion, self-revelation (usually showing too little of themselves, at times displaying too much), and embodied, sensory experience. And they argued that the ethnographers were unwilling to define any sort of personal relationship with the musics they were researching, an approach that some American readers might find scholarly and dispassionate, but many of the students found high-handed and arrogant. To them, it evinced a strange reluctance on the ethnographers’ part to engage on a human level with the people, places, and musics about whom they were writing—a failure that one international student referred to as an unwillingness to “get dirty.” This led us to consider what a truly decolonized ethnomusicology might resemble. Certainly it must consist of more than first-world scholars’ endless hand-wringing about the doomed politics of representation and must include scholarly voices from varied points along the insider-outsider continuum. If ethnomusicologists from the mainstream are receptive to voices from the margins, the ubiquity of unbalanced power dynamics and the scarcity of relations of fair and equal exchange in the globalized, post-colonial world need not impede productive scholarly dialogue, any more than they have inhibited musical innovation.

Notes 1 The authors would like to thank the editors for their helpful and thorough feedback on this chapter and Katherine Meizel for reading suggestions. We would also like to thank our graduate students from the 2016–2017 academic year. The following discussion makes no claim to be a comprehensive review of the scholarship on post-colonialism and globalization in ethnomusicology; instead, we hope to present a small but representative sampling of the wealth of recent writings available in this area. For further discussion of the impact of the crisis of representation on ethnomusicology and a brief review of the history of anthropology and the early history of ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume, especially n1 and n15). 2 Scholars in other fields, such as feminism, have also struggled with Marxist theories of class domination. On feminist research into gender and sexuality in ethnomusicology, see Koskoff (2014), ­Sugarman (this volume), and Text Box 2.2. 3 For an overview of the many definitions of the word “post-coloniality,” see Slemon (2006: 51–52). 4 The term “modernity” was traditionally used in the humanities and social sciences to refer to a set of major social transformations that began to emerge in Western Europe after the Middle Ages, including the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, the development of the scientific method, and new forms of empire. (For more on the notion of modernity, see Manuel [this volume].) It is worth noting here that contemporary anthropologists have critiqued the idea that modernity takes a single form or that it began in Western Europe and moved to the rest of the planet, and a substantial body of scholarship exists on the diverse forms that modernity takes around the world (see Goankar 1999). Clifford Geertz has written that, for developing countries, “modernity turned out to be less a fixed destination than a vast and inconstant field of warring possibilities, possibilities neither simultaneously reachable nor systematically connected…” (1995: 138). Del Negro (2004: 51–56) provides a useful overview of the alternative modernities literature. On the eighteenth-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, see Sugarman (this volume, n9). 5 In this chapter, we focus on countries that experienced European colonization, as post-colonial studies usually does (see, for example, Smith 1975; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2006; and Pedersen 2015). However, colonial (and therefore post-colonial) histories have shaped other modern nation-states, such as Taiwan and Korea, which were colonized by Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a thoughtful and poignant post-colonial study of Korean and Japanese literature in the shadow of Japanese imperialism, see Kwon (2015).

Post-colonialism and Globalization  133 6 On cultural evolutionism in nineteenth-century comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, n15, this volume). 7 On globalization and race, see Mahon (this volume). 8 Though it is written from a European perspective, Pederson (2015) provides a thorough history of European imperialism in the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the end of colonialism. On the relationship between World War II and decolonization, see Smith (1975). 9 For an overview of the controversy surrounding Mugabe’s land redistribution, see Shaw (2003). 10 It is worth noting that, although the music multinationals did not operate in Burma/Myanmar in the early 2000s, the public there still overwhelmingly demanded to hear popular music, including pop, hip-hop, and heavy metal (MacLachlan 2011). 11 Not everyone in the field has found this development to be unproblematic. For example, Ellen ­Koskoff (2014: 70–72, 174–9) presents a trenchant feminist critique of the ethnomusicological embrace of post-colonial and globalization approaches, arguing that such perspectives were often developed at the expense of other critical frameworks. 12 Fanon has also had a major influence on theories of race (see Mahon, this volume). 13 To our knowledge, Fanon did not refer to himself as a phenomenologist, but because of his interest in experience, contact with Merleau-Ponty, and relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, his work is often counted as part of that tradition by scholars today (see Berger, this volume). 14 On Gilroy, race, and cultural studies, see Mahon (this volume). 15 It is worth noting that Spivak understood that Derrida, an Algerian Jew in the French academy, was himself a post-colonial subject. See Derrida ([1996] 1998) for a discussion of his own post-colonial predicament. 16 In an interview with Australian scholar Nikos Papastergiadis, Spivak explained the inherent tensions within strategic essentialism by referencing two figures from Greek mythology. Associating the strategic use of essentialism with Narcissus and the critique of essentialism with Echo, she states that, in the kind of political work she is advocating: We are shuttling between Narcissus and Echo: fixating upon the pre-fixed image, a pre-fixed staging, saying to other women within the culture that is how we should be identified. On the other hand, the construction of ourselves as counter-echo to Western dominance, we cannot in fact be confined to behaving as we have been defined. Where there is a moment of slippage, there is also a robust aporetic [paradoxical] position, rather than being either the self-righteous continuist narcissism in the name of identity, or the message of despair of nothing but Echo. (1998: 54) On the relationship between Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism and Judith Butler’s idea of “strategic provisionality” (1991), see Sugarman (this volume). 17 We do not want to give the impression that the slums’ former inhabitants become the new occupants of high-rise developments. The far more common pattern is for slum-dwellers to be displaced by real estate projects in the metropolitan core out to an ever-widening peripheral slum sprawl, where they are joined by millions of rural migrants from the impoverished countryside. The dismal result of this globalization-accelerated process in developing countries is “a shanty-town world encircling the fortified enclaves of the urban rich” (Davis 2004: 35). 18 In an interview, Arjun Appadurai (2004) posits a third, mediating alternative between the two poles: Now, the third [alternative] is somewhere between these two, in the dialectic between the two. There is the dimension of globalization as an outside, distant, fast-moving, abstract and scary process, and there is the experience of globalization as a vehicle for the expansion of local horizons, aspirations, expectations, possibilities—if you like, the utopian side. Between these two there is a dialectic in which the local gets produced. … There is a kind of encounter between these things which is sometimes very comfortable and civil and democratic and so on, and at other times it is harsh, as we see especially in the global sites where some kind of warfare has become a feature of everyday life. (119) The vast majority of the literature we survey in this chapter seeks this third alternative of which Appadurai speaks. We would suggest, however, that this middle ground is far more elusive than the above quote implies. 19 No one doubts that Adorno was a harsh critic of popular culture, and assessments of his ideas by contemporary music scholars vary widely. Some writers argue that his denunciation of popular music reflects a thoroughgoing and fundamentally problematic elitism (e.g. Tagg 1998; Taylor 2016: 7–10). Others, like Peter Manuel, are more sympathetic. While acknowledging these critiques, Manuel’s chapter in this volume maintains that Adorno’s denunciation of popular music should be understood

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20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27 28

in the context of his critical appraisal of Western art music and suggests how some of his ideas can be judiciously applied to non-Western music cultures. See Zuidervaart (2015) for a useful bibliography of contemporary Adorno scholarship. —Harris M. Berger Early studies also occasionally use the term “world beat,” a genre label that fell out of fashion in the 1990s. In an extraordinary historical work, American Studies scholar Michael Denning (2015) argues that the advent of electrical recording in the mid-1920s created ideal conditions for the flourishing of commercial vernacular musics across the colonial world. These musics—including highlife, marabi, kroncong, tarab, and numerous others—fueled the formation of national cultures and the drive towards decolonization. Though inspired by Bhabha, my (Wallach’s) use of the notion of hybridity (2008: 257–59) does not follow his formulation closely and is derived from Ang’s application of his ideas (2001). Genre is not always the preferred term in these studies, but it is used quite frequently. In general, the word genre is understood in ethnomusicological work on globalization to refer to a set of musical discourses that index one or more social formations. For example, the term “heavy metal” refers to a music genre that indexes the music scenes of heavy metal musicians and fans. In a somewhat tautological fashion, people in these social formations are often seen as exhibiting traits (such as aggression or rebelliousness) associated with this music. For the ethnomusicology of globalization, what is most significant about these recursive dynamics is that they can be explored ethnographically (see Holt 2007 and Beaster-Jones, this volume). On social scale in ethnomusicology, see also Slobin ([1993] 2000) and Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume). Another example of the globalization of salsa: during my (Wallach’s) Indonesian fieldwork in 1999 and 2000, Jakarta had a night club called Salsa that featured salsa music and dancing, as well as a dance instructor from Cuba. It’s worth noting that Western art music is extremely popular in East Asia, particularly South Korea and Japan. It may be tempting to assume that this is another example of Western ideas being pushed by globalization, but the fact that this music seems to be stagnant or perhaps even declining in Europe and North America makes such an explanation overly simple and unconvincing. On the impact of Western art music in East Asia, see Everett and Lau (2004); on the music’s global impact, see Yang (2014). These realignments are perhaps best summed up by Fareed Zakaria’s famous quote, “This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else” (2008). Post-colonial scholars such as Sumarsam (1995, 2013, 2014), Kofi Agawu (2003), and George Worlasi Kwasi Dor (2014) have made groundbreaking contributions to ethnomusicology, but their numbers are few. For an exemplary collaborative venture in ethnomusicology across the post-colonial divide, see Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Solomon (2012). On Agawu’s notion of groove in African music, see Rahaim (this volume).

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Post-colonialism and Globalization  137 Katz, Max. 2017. Lineage of Loss: Counter-narratives of North Indian Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Kawano, Kei, and Shuhei Hosokawa. 2011. “Thunder in the Far East: The Heavy Metal Industry in 1990s Japan.” In Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World, edited by Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, 247–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keil, Charles. (1966) 1991. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.” ­McClure’s Magazine, February 12. Koskoff, Ellen. 2014. A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Krüger Bridge, Simone. 2018. Trajectories and Themes in World Popular Music: Globalization, Capitalism, Identity. Bristol, CT: Equinox Press. Kwon, Nayoung Aimee. 2015. Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lewis, Bernard. 1982. “Reply to Edward W. Said and Oleg Grabar.” In “Orientalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books. August 12. ———. 1993. Islam and the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lovesey, Oliver. 2017. “Decolonizing the Ear: Introduction to ‘Popular Music and the Postcolonial.’” Popular Music and Society 40 (1): 1–4. Luvaas, Brent. 2013. “Exemplary Centers and Musical Elsewheres: On Authenticity and Autonomy in Indonesian Indie Music.” Asian Music 44 (2): 95–114. Lysloff, René T. A. 2016. “Worlding Music in Jogjakarta: Tales of the Global Postmodern.” Ethnomusicology 60 (3): 484–507. MacLachlan, Heather. 2011. Burma’s Pop Music Industry: Creators, Distributors, Censors. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Manuel, Peter. 1988. Popular Musics of the Non-Western World: An Introductory Survey. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan-Singing, Chutney, and the Making of Indo-Caribbean Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Manuel, Peter, with Michael Largey. 2016. Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marjenin, Peter. 2014. The Metal Folk: The Impact of Music and Culture on Folk Metal and the Music of ­Korpiklaani. MA Thesis, Kent State University. Marinescu, Valentina, ed. 2014. The Global Impact of South Korean Popular Culture: Hallyu Unbound. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Marx, Karl. (1867) 1915. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Company. Mathews, Gordon. 2011. Ghetto at the Center of the Universe: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McDonald, David A. 2013. My Voice is My Weapon: Music, Nationalism, and the Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McGraw, Andrew. 2016. “Radio Java.” In Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies, edited by Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim, 323–39. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Meintjes, Louise. 1990. “Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning.” Ethnomusicology 34 (1): 37–73. ———. 2003. Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miszczynski, Milosz, and Adriana Helbig, ed. 2017. Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mitchell, Tony, ed. 2001. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Moore, Rebekah. 2013. “Elevating the Underground: Claiming a Space for Indie Music among Bali’s Many Soundworlds.” Asian Music 44 (2): 135–59. Mori, Yoshitaka. 2014. “J-Pop Goes the World: A New Global Fandom in the Age of Digital Media.” In Made in Japan: Studies in Popular Music, edited by Toru Mitsui, 211–24. New York: Routledge.

138  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton Morelli, Sarah. 2016. “‘A Superior Race of Strong Women’: North Indian Classical Dance in the San Francisco Bay Area.” In The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity and Community in the United States, edited by Kip Lornell and Anne K. Rasmussen, 340–67. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia, and Thomas Solomon, eds. 2012. Ethnomusicology in East Africa: Perspectives from Uganda and Beyond. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers. Nercessian, Andy. 2002. Postmodernism and Globalization in Ethnomusicology: An Epistemological Problem. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Nettl, Bruno. 2010. Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Novak, David. 2013. Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Olson, Benjamin Hedge. 2017. “Within the Perpetual Pentagram: Religious Discourse in the Hawai’i Metal Scene.” Metal Music Studies 3 (1): 47–62. Papastergiadis, Nikos. 1998. Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity. New York: Rivers Oram Press. Pedersen, Susan. 2015. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. Oxford: University of Oxford Press. Perullo, Alex, and John Fenn. 2003. “Language Ideologies, Choices, and Practices in Eastern African Hip Hop.” In Global Pop, Local Language, edited by Harris M. Berger and Michael Thomas Carroll, 19–51. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. 1994. “Globalisation as Hybridisation.” International Sociology 9 (2): 161–84. Ramnarine, Tina. 2003. Ilmatar’s Inspirations: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Changing Soundscapes of Finnish Folk Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reed, Daniel. 2016. Abidjan USA: Music, Dance, and Mobility in the Lives of Four Ivorian Immigrants. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rivera, Raquel Z., Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez, eds. 2009. Reggaeton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roseman, Marina. 2000. “The Canned Sardine Spirit Takes the Mic.” The World of Music 42 (2): 115–36. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1981. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1991. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1997. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Rev. ed. New York: Random House. Said, Edward W., and Oleg Grabar. 1982. “To the Editors.” In “Orientalism: An Exchange.” New York Review of Books. August 12. Schiller, Herbert I. 2009. “Not Yet the Post-Imperialist Era.” Critical Studies and Mass Communication 8 (1): 13–28. Shao, Oliver Y. 2016. “A Cosmopolitan Social Justice Approach to Education.” Africa Today 63 (2): 107–11. Sharp, Daniel B. 2014. Between Nostalgia and Apocalypse: Popular Music and the Staging of Brazil. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Shaw, William H. 2003. “‘They Stole Our Land’: Debating the Expropriation of White Farms in ­Zimbabwe.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (1): 75–89. Slemon, Stephen. 2006. “The Scramble for Post-colonialism.” In Post-colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, 51–56. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Slobin, Mark. (1993) 2000. Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West. 2nd ed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Tony, ed. 1975. The End of the European Empire: Decolonization after World War II. Lexington, MA: Heath. Solomon, Thomas. 2012. “Where is the Postcolonial in Ethnomusicology?” In Ethnomusicology in East ­Africa: Perspectives from Uganda and Beyond, edited by Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Thomas ­Solomon, 216–51. Kampala, Uganda: Fountain Publishers.

Post-colonialism and Globalization  139 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1996. “More on Power/Knowledge.” In The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, 141–74. New York: Routledge. ———. 1999. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steingo, Gavin. 2016. Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sterling, Marvin. 2010. Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stokes, Martin. 2004. “Music and the Global Order.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 47–72. Sumarsam. 1995. Gamelan: Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. Javanese Gamelan and the West. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ———. 2014. “Javanese Music Historiography: The Lost Gamelan of Gresik.” In Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo, 327–45. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Tagg, Philip. 1998. “The Göteborg Connection: Lessons in the History and Politics of Popular Music Education and Research.” Popular Music 17 (2): 219–42. Taylor, Timothy. 1997. Global Pop: World Music, World Markets. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007. Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2016. Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2017. Music in the World: Selected Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tejasen, Chirabodee, and Brendan Luyt. 2014. “The Hophrasamut Wachirayan: Library and Club of the Siamese Aristocracy, 1881–1905.” Information and Culture: A Journal of History 49 (3): 386–400. Tomlinson, John. 1991. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Tylor, E(dward) B(urnett). 1871. Primitive Culture. New York: Dover. Urban, Greg. 2001. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Veal, Michael, and E. Tammy Kim, eds. 2016. Punk Ethnography: Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wallach, Jeremy. 2003. “The Poetics of Electrosonic Presence: Recorded Music and the Materiality of Sound.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 15 (1): 34–64. ———. 2005a. “Underground Rock Music and Democratization in Indonesia.” World Literature Today 79(3–4): 16–20. ———. 2005b. “Engineering Techno-Hybrid Grooves in Two Indonesian Sound Studios.” In Wired for Sound: Engineering and Technologies in Sonic Cultures, edited by Paul D. Greene and Thomas Porcello, 138–55. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2008. Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2011. “Unleashed in the East: Metal Music, Masculinity, and ‘Malayness’ in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.” In Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World, edited by Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, 86–105. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. “Indieglobalization and the Triumph of Punk in Indonesia.” In Sounds and the City: Essays on Music, Globalisation and Place, edited by Brett Lashua, Karl Spracklen, and Stephen Wagg, 148–61. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallach, Jeremy, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, eds. 2011. Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-system. 2 vols. New York: Academic Press. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press. Waxer, Lise, ed. 2002. Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meanings in Latin Popular Music. New York: Routledge.

140  Jeremy Wallach and Esther Clinton Weidman, Amanda. 2006. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weintraub, Andrew. 2013. “The Sound and Spectacle of Dangdut Koplo: Genre and Counter-genre in East Java, Indonesia.” Asian Music 44 (2): 160–94. White, Bob, ed. 2012. Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Whitmore, Aleysia. 2016. “The Art of Representing the Other: Industry Personnel in the World Music Industry.” Ethnomusicology 60 (2): 329–55. Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. “Sound, Silence, Music: Power.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 347–53. Yang, Mina. 2014. Planet Beethoven: Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium. Middletown, CT: ­Wesleyan University Press. Zakaria, Fareed. 2008. “The Rise of the Rest.” Fareed Zakaria Blog. May 12. https://fareedzakaria. com/2008/05/12/the-rise-of-the-rest/. Zheng, Su. 2010. Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zuidervaart, Lambert. 2015. “Theodor W. Adorno.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/.

6 Performance Studies and Critical Improvisation Studies in Ethnomusicology Understanding Music and Culture through Situated Practice Ellen Waterman Performance studies and critical improvisation studies (CIS) are distinct, interdisciplinary fields that share a common focus on situated practice as their object of study. Despite their many differences, it makes sense to consider these fields together in this chapter, as both help us to understand the intricacies, mediations, and effects of musical practices—all of which are central concerns for ethnomusicology. This emphasis on situated practice moves our focus away from music as text and from musical performance as the skilled interpretation of the text. Ethnomusicologist Alejandro Madrid has described this as a “shift away from asking about the meaning of sound in culture and society into asking about the social and cultural uses of that sound” (2009: np, my emphasis). Further, as performance studies scholar Tracy Davis argues (2008), the notion of performance draws attention to the agency of audiences as well as musicians (and other actors). Performance also situates sound within multi-sensory contexts (Hahn 2007). Davis defines the “performative turn” as the recognition that “individual behavior derives from collective, even unconscious, influences and is manifest as observable behavior, both overt and quotidian, individual and collective” (1). Significantly, she situates the performative turn in relation to other intellectual movements since the 1970s, including the “‘linguistic turn’ (emphasizing language’s role in constructing perception)” and the “‘cultural turn’ (tracking the everyday meanings of culture, and culture’s formative effect on identities)” (1). We might also posit an emergent “improvisative turn” (emphasizing the contingent, negotiated, and relational aspects of individual and collective behavior). Performance studies and the branch of CIS that deals with music share a commitment to embodied and experiential knowledge produced through situated practice.1 Further, these fields operate at the junction of, on the one hand, ethnographic, historical, and theoretical work, and, on the other hand, artistic creation. The claim of performance theorist Richard Schechner that “the relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral” (2003: 1) could also be made of CIS. Many participants in both fields are engaged in practice-based research methods, and my approach in this chapter is guided by my interdisciplinary background as an experimental flutist-vocalist and scholar. Creative activity, however, is only one arena for studying situated practice. Scholars also understand both improvisation and performance to be quotidian and pervasive within social life. Jazz musicians improvise, but so do people navigating a crowded sidewalk. Actors perform roles on stage or screen, but so do we all. For example, I write this paragraph performing my role as scholar, but later, in my starring role as mother, I will nag my daughter to do her homework before going off to play a gig. This conception of the “presentation of self ” (Goffman 1959, discussed below) has been followed by theories of the performative nature of the subject, which some scholars see as a more nuanced and dialogical theory, one that more

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fully recognizes the affordances and constraints through which identity is performed.2 As ­ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong suggests, “moving from self to subjectivity creates discursive environments in which authenticity must give way to position and identification” (2008: 83). My performances as scholar or mother or musician are shaped by my positionality in terms of socioeconomics, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. My subjectivity is not unitary; on the contrary, it is entangled with all the other animate and inanimate factors in the environment in which I operate, and this co-creative relationship is captured in the dynamic flux of everyday improvisation.3 It is important to note that, as organized fields, performance studies and CIS have quite different histories. Performance studies developed in the 1960s and 1970s with roots in theatre, anthropology, communication studies, and folklore. It coalesced slowly over time in different locations, with its various branches pursuing distinct agendas, and it only began to become institutionalized starting in the late 1970s. In the academy, for example, performance studies developed robust programs at New York University (at the nexus of theatre and cultural anthropology) and Northwestern University (at the nexus of communication studies, ethnography, and oral interpretation). Since the 1990s, the field has expanded rapidly through its society, Performance Studies International, and journals such as TDR (The Drama Review) and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. In recent years, the field has become truly international with the establishment of academic programs across the globe. Critical improvisation studies began in the early twenty-first century with initial efforts at field building by scholar-practitioners in music and dance at the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) and the design of an interdisciplinary and international research project on Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice (ICASP) at the University of Guelph in Canada. This project was formalized and extended in 2013 as the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), with six university partners in Canada and the US.4 CIS is still emergent and not yet fully entrenched in the academy. At the time of this writing, however, the first graduate program in CIS has been approved at the University of Guelph, where the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation was founded in 2004. In just two decades, CIS has established a foothold as an interdisciplinary area of study. Indeed, despite the institutionalization of performance studies and CIS as fields, many participants consider themselves to be interdisciplinary (or even post-disciplinary), situating their work in the lines that cut across, or inhabit the margins between, disciplines. In this chapter, I will tease out significant ideas from each field that have been of use to ethnomusicologists and suggest further avenues of inquiry. Of course, ethnomusicologists have always paid close attention to musical performance, including improvisation. My focus in this chapter is on selected key influences and major works in performance studies and CIS as institutionalized academic fields.5 In the first section, I discuss the older and more established field of performance studies, tracing some of its many roots and interdisciplinary traditions, and highlighting the work of ethnomusicologists who have engaged with performance theory. In the second, shorter, section, I discuss CIS, with particular attention to the generative role of music in the field. I conclude by bringing performance studies and CIS together in a discussion of future directions for ethnomusicology.

Performance Studies There are many possible ways to trace the intellectual roots of what may now be considered disciplinary performance studies. In this section, I begin by briefly highlighting

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the contributions of five selected precursors: J. L. Austin (1911–1960), Roman Jakobson ­(1896–1982), Gregory Bateson (1904–1980), Erving Goffman (1922–1982), and Milton Singer (1912–1994).6 Some of the earliest work that influenced performance studies occurred in linguistics as part of an expansion of the field from the investigation of structures of language to the analysis of speech acts (Searle 1969). There is room to mention just two key ideas here: performative language and multi-functionality. The notion of performative language was originally developed by philosopher J. L. Austin ([1962] 1995). Modifying a construction that Michel Foucault used to describe a similar function of discourse (Foucault [1969] 1972: 49 quoted in Sugarman, this volume), one may define performative language as language that produces the thing it names.7 For example, in a marriage ceremony, the declaration “I do” (accept you as my husband/wife) enacts the condition of marriage. Such performative language depends on a felicitous context (e.g. that the wedding is taking place in real life, not in a fictional context) and an authoritative speaker (e.g. only a licensed authority such as a religious leader, judge, or justice of the peace may officiate at a marriage).8 Austin’s performative was the seed for one of performance studies’ most influential theories, performativity, which was developed by Judith Butler (b. 1956) in the 1990s. Butler’s use of the term shifts the force of performative language speech acts and their social context to discourse and power relations themselves (see also Foucault [1969] 1972). This conception of performativity has been taken up by many ethnomusicologists and will be discussed separately below. If the notion of performative language illustrated the ability of language to constitute social relations, Roman Jakobson looked at the nature of the linguistic encounter itself. Following the psychologist Karl Bühler ([1934] 1990), Jakobson described both language and communication as “multi-functional,” by which he meant that in situated interaction, speaking always involves six inter-related dimensions that encompass various degrees of expression and affect (1960). All six functions operate simultaneously, but in any given situation some may be foregrounded and others backgrounded. Jakobson’s theory invites us to pay attention not only to the referential meaning of language, but also to the materiality of sounds and their emergence in performance.9 Jakobson was highly influential in the forms of performance studies developed in linguistic anthropology and folklore (see Text Box 6.1). Where the structural linguists treated language as an abstract, formal system of rules largely divorced from social context, Jakobson showed that language structure couldn’t be understood apart from the phenomena of social interaction, saw poetics as a fundamental feature of language (rather than a rarefied domain employed only by artists), and illustrated the richness of language in performance. (See Beaster-Jones [this volume] for a more detailed discussion of Austin and Jakobson.) The performative turn in the study of language was considerably amplified in theories of behavior by anthropologists and sociologists. Trained in biology and anthropology but invested in psychology, two of Gregory Bateson’s contributions to performance studies are the concepts of metacommunication and framing. Metacommunication is second-order communication—signs or other communicative acts that are “about” other signs or communicative acts and serve to inflect their meaning. For example, I tell you that you’re in big trouble for eating the last piece of chocolate cake, but I wink to show you that I’m not really serious. Bateson introduced the term “frame” to describe what helps us to interpret such ­ antasy” signals within a given context (see also Goffman 1974). In “A Theory of Play and F ([1954] 2000), Bateson gives the example of animals play fighting. Here, the playful nips are not simple acts of aggression. Situated within the play frame, they are signals of fighting, clearly understood by the animals as non-serious and may even indicate affection, and ­Bateson examines the idea of metacommunication and framing in human behaviors that

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range from games to rituals, threats, and histrionics.10 Think of what frames musical activity as a rehearsal, a concert, a religious ritual, or a kitchen party: this might include casual or formal behavior, the presence or absence of an audience, and the type of venue, among many other factors. The frame can also affect the meaning content of the behavior. For example, when indigenous songs were “salvaged” by anthropologists in the early twentieth century as recordings and archived for posterity, they were violently separated from the important cultural frames that indicate when, where, and by whom they should be performed and heard (Robinson 2017). It is not only language and communication that constitute performance. The idea that we are each constantly performing a number of social roles is encapsulated in sociologist Erving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Drawing on the language of theatre to describe everyday encounters, Goffman urges us to pay close attention to the surfaces of social interaction: to gesture, tone of voice, dress, props, and behavior that indicate social roles, which are played with varying degrees of self-consciousness. The important point here is that even the most pragmatic behavior is communicative (in the sense that we concern ourselves with how the fact that we are doing something is understood by others) and that everyday behavior is performative of identity. Goffman further showed that all performance is socialized—that is, that it is both constrained by social expectations and open to interpretation and misrepresentation. Philip Auslander’s work on musical personae (2006) offers a contemporary perspective on the Goffmanian performance of social roles. He argues that when musicians play music, they simultaneously perform the role of “musician,” an idea that is particularly clear in the celebrity culture of popular music but that holds true across other genres as well. If Goffman’s work on the “presentation of self ” oriented scholarly attention toward everyday conduct, the idea of “cultural performance,” developed by the anthropologist Milton Singer, drew attention to organized programs of activity, such as theatre, music, and dance, as well as festivals and religious and social rites (1959). Singer encouraged scholars to study these framed performances as situations where people come together to negotiate key issues in their culture; in this sense, such performances constitute a form of what the anthropologist and folklorist Richard Bauman (1989) called “cultural reflexivity” (i.e. culture about culture) and are a key part of the social world. In sum, the roots of performance studies lie in theories of language, communication, and behavior that point to the ubiquity of performance in everyday life and extend ideas from theatre to analyze situated activity in both the quotidian realm and the performing arts. Ethnomusicology and Performance Studies Since the 1980s, ethnomusicologists have frequently engaged with the field of performance studies. For example, Norma McLeod and Marcia Herndon (1980) co-edited an important early anthology, The Ethnography of Musical Performance, that drew upon performance theorists such as Goffman, Dell Hymes, Richard Schechner, and Victor Turner, while Ruth Stone and Steven Feld both had relationships with the work of Bauman, who taught in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University from 1986 to 2008. Why Suyá Sing, Anthony Seeger’s influential ethnography of indigenous music in Mato Grosso, Brazil, made use of Turner’s theory of liminality, discussed below, as well as other ideas from performance theory (1987). In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ethnomusicologist Michelle Kisliuk pursued graduate work in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University (NYU), and Harris M. Berger’s publications on heavy metal music, which first appeared in the mid-1990s, drew extensively on performance folkloristics. More recently, Kisliuk, along with ethnomusicologists such as Deborah Wong (2004), Tomie Hahn (2007), and Henry Spiller (2010), have used Butler’s theory of performativity

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to explore the complex intersections between performance and identity. My own work (e.g. Smith and Waterman 2013) draws on Butler and is inspired by other performance theorists engaged with feminist and queer theories, such as Sue-­Ellen Case (1990; Case and Reinelt 1991), Jill Dolan (1993), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Parker and Sedgwick 1995b). In postcolonial analyses of music, Alejandro Madrid (2015) and Thomas Hilder (2012) have both employed performance theorist Diana Taylor’s work ([2003] 2007, 1997). Conversely, ethnomusicology has had a direct impact on disciplinary performance studies, providing faculty members for major programs in that field, including Shayna Silverstein at Northwestern University, who has written on Syrian dance musics (2016), and Deborah Kapchan at New York University, whose influential work examines Moroccan Gnawa trance and ritual (2007) and cutting-edge ideas on performance and sound (2017). Clearly, performance studies is a multivalent field that has much to offer ethnomusicology. If performance, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett claimed in a 2001 interview, is an “organizing idea to think about almost anything,” how exactly might this concept be used in music research, and how might we understand the relationship between performance studies and ethnomusicology? In this section, I will explore these questions by focusing on three relationships between performance and ethnography, a methodology that, while contested (Hammersley 2006; Ingold 2017), remains important to both fields: the ethnography of performance (the interpretation of cultural performance based on intensive participant observation), performance ethnography (the theatrical representation of discoveries made through fieldwork, often as a form of critical and collaborative performance pedagogy; see Denzin 2003: 16), and performative ethnography (a self-reflexive approach to ethnography that considers the researcher’s own body and bodily memory as a resource; see Haanstad 2014: 97). Ethnography of Performance: Liminality, Ritual, and Social Drama Some of the most influential concepts in performance studies stem from the remarkable collaboration between cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) and theatre scholar Richard Schechner (b. 1934). In 1979, Schechner offered the first academic course in performance theory and, in 1980, was instrumental in transforming the Drama Department at New York University into the first Department of Performance Studies.11 Schechner and Turner’s long collaboration resulted in the complementary books The Anthropology of Performance (Turner 1986) and Between Theatre and Anthropology (Schechner 1985). Central to Turner’s work was the analysis of ritual, and his research on the Ndembu people of central Africa (1967) led to an organizational and processual model of ritual in relation to everyday life. He theorized rituals as “social dramas” (1969), a process of working out roles and relationships that went through fixed stages but with an outcome that could not be known in advance and that was never final. Instead of being separate from everyday life, such ritual performances are border activities, sites of negotiation, with the potential to disrupt the status quo, if only temporarily. Building on the ideas of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep ([1908] 1960), Turner employs the term liminal (from the Latin limen, meaning threshold or margin) to describe such states of transition; his term liminal persona applies to a person in just such a “betwixt and between state” (1964). Schechner, in turn, found correlations between Turner’s model of ritual and the process he himself identified in theatre, with its stages of creation, rehearsal/workshopping, and performance (99 ff ). For him, ritual and theatre are both framed experiences set off from everyday time and space, and each has the capacity to suspend or even transform the social relationships and experiences of its participants. Building on this work, Schechner developed an “infinity” model (2003: 67) that showed the unending “mutual positive feedback relationship of social dramas and aesthetic performances” (68).

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Text Box 6.1  Performance Studies in Folklore Equally concerned with the ethnography of performance is the branch of performance studies that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s at the meeting place of folklore studies (which is also known as folkloristics) and linguistic anthropology. Growing out of the work of Américo Paredes ([1958] 1970), Roman Jakobson (1960), and Del Hymes (1962), scholars like Dan Ben-Amos (1971), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1975), Richard Bauman ([1977] 1984), and Roger Abrahams (1977) sought to make a fundamental shift in folklore studies by taking performance, rather than texts, as their object of study. (On the role of Parades in the history of folklore, see Limón (2007); on the role of Jakobson and Hymes in the history of linguistics and also on the critique of textualism in music, see Beaster-Jones, this volume.) The approach that these scholars developed—which was synthesized in two important edited collections, Paredes and Bauman (1972) and Ben-Amos and Goldstein ([1975] 2013)—represented a sea change in folklore studies. In previous generations, most scholars in the discipline had understood fieldwork as a means of collecting bodies of narrative or song, which could then be subject to analysis largely independent of situated context of use or embodied performance. The new folklorists inverted this relationship, viewing the text as something that enabled performance and taking performance itself as the focus of interpretation. Doing so allowed them to show how folklore emerges from the dialogic interactions of audience and performer, is shaped by both situated context and large-scale power relations, and is fundamentally dynamic and emergent. Particularly significant was Bauman’s Verbal Art as Performance, which understood performance as a potentiality in any form of interaction where the speaker takes “responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (Bauman [1977] 1984: 11) and showed how the performance of expressive culture was bound to the genre systems and other cultural features of a speech community. In the 1980s, inquiry in performance folkloristics developed in many directions. Building on the early work of scholars like Dennis Tedlock ([1972] 1999) and Alan Dundes ([1964] 1980), scholars in folklore and an area of linguistic anthropology known as ethnopoetics drew new attention to the sonic and kinesic components of verbal art. For example, the folklorist Elizabeth C. Fine examined the role that gesture plays in folklore performance (1984), while linguistic anthropologists like Joel Sherzer (1982) attended to performative features like prosody and pitch contour, and analyzed the culturally and linguistically specific ways in which poetic speech is structured. Another strain of work explored the complex interplay between everyday talk and the affectively heightened genres of verbal art, such as narrative and song (Titon 1988). And growing out of the seminal work of Milman Parry and Alfred Lord (Lord [1960] 2000), a vast body of writings developed on the improvisation of verbal art through oral formulae (see Foley 1985). A rich review of the performance literature from this period in linguistic anthropology and folklore can be found in Bauman and Briggs (1990). Performance folkloristics continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s, with researchers examining an ever-wider range of issues, from gender and public display (Kapchan 1996; Del Negro 2005), to popular music (Berger 1999), wayfinding practices (Gabbert 2007), sports (Lindquist 2006), and the performative dimensions of material culture (Everett 2002; LaDousa 2007). In the contemporary discipline, scholars like Simon Bronner (2012) and the contributors to a special issue of Cultural Analysis have explored the intersection of performance theory and practice

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theory (Buccitelli and Schimitt 2016). While textual analysis still exists within folklore studies, the fundamental reorientation that performance theory initiated has been widely absorbed into the field, and it is safe to say that the majority of work in contemporary folklore studies is informed, either explicitly or implicitly, by performance theory. It is worth noting that there are significant connections between performance ­approaches in folklore studies and ethnomusicology, with scholars such as Deborah Kapchan, Jeff Todd Titon, and myself developing our work at the intersection of these fields. With her academic home in the Institutes of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Ruth Stone’s ethnographies of the music of the Kpelle ethnic group in Liberia ([1982] 2010; 1988) were also informed by performance folkloristics. —Harris M. Berger

The confluence of theatre and anthropology has undoubted appeal, particularly for ethnomusicologists studying clearly demarcated, ritual performances, such as festivals and stadium concerts. Its focus on process and organization highlights not only the actions of performers but also those of audiences and organizers, and its emphasis on transition and transformation captures the affective dimension of situated practice. What ethnomusicologists brought to this strain of performance studies was attention to the role of sound and music in such processes. Anthony Seeger (1987) drew on the notion of liminality in his analysis of the Suyá Mouse Ceremony, through which a boy is introduced into the “male collective activity of the village” (117). In these events, it is not only the boy who plays a liminal role, Seeger explains, but “the entire male population of the village,” and singing is at the “heart of the liminal matter” of the ritual (117). Here, singing is the means by which the boy’s new status is established and the men’s status as men is confirmed. In exploring these practices, Seeger developed a “musical anthropology” (in contrast to Alan Merriam’s 1964 Anthropology of Music) that didn’t merely place music in social context, but understood the social as a form of organization that could be best understood in musical terms.12 The attention to performance as a liminal space of possibility corresponds to the affective dimension of many kinds of musical performances. We have all been caught up and transported by musical performance, rapt in the experience of spontaneous fellow-feeling that Turner called communitas (1982). And we have all experienced the return to “normal life” when the concert or the festival ends. (See Rahaim [this volume] on the place of Turner, Schechner, and ritual theory in the literature on participation.) If the Suyá employ music in the liminal space of rituals to achieve a transformation of social identity, the environmental music dramas of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933) highlight the use of music in the liminal phase of ritual for the purpose of psychological transformation. In my ethnography of one such work (Waterman 1997), the concepts of social drama and liminality mapped rather neatly onto Schafer’s own penchant for ritual structures.13 The epilogue to his massive twelve-part Patria series of environmental music dramas, called And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, has been performed annually since 1989. Each August, participants camp in the woods for ten days and perform a daily series of rituals involving music, storytelling, dance, and drama that culminate in a pageant, during which a number of the principle characters undergo transformation. (For example, in one ritual, a white stag character is transformed into a young man.) Built on myth and Jungian archetypes, performance in this work is meant to be efficacious. At the level of the ritual’s mythic narrative, ritual performances reunite the alienated hero and heroine, and order

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is restored to a chaotic world. The rituals are also meant to be transformative at the personal level. Participants who make the annual pilgrimage from their largely urban homes across Canada to live and work together in Ontario’s Haliburton Forest seek a transformed relationship to both nature and art. Schafer has written eloquently about his belief in the transformative potential of performing hierophantic music in non-traditional spaces and over extended periods of time: We will not try to change things here; we will let them change us. And if what we produce together is no longer art, it will be no great loss; for the urge for this new freedom did not come from the inner coil of art, but from the necessity to find a new relationship, between ourselves and the wide cosmos. (1991: 97–98) In the Wolf Project, as it is known to participants, ritual performance occupies a liminal space between the aesthetic performance of music making and everyday activities, such as canoeing, making camp fires, cooking, and digging latrines. The participants are a mix of professionals and amateurs, and range in age from small children to, until recently, the elderly composer himself; they take on the roles of both performers and audience members, artists, and crew. Through this dance of everyday and ritual performance, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon illustrates one of Schechner’s most influential concepts—the idea of performance as “restored behavior,” which he defines as the “habits, rituals, and routines of life” that can be “rearranged or reconstructed… [and are thus] independent of the causal systems (personal, social, political, technological, etc.) that brought them into existence” (2003: 28). Performers in the Wolf Project exhibit restored behavior in two ways: on the one hand, they recreate everyday activities and social relations (including artistic activities such as rehearsal) in the quasi-wilderness context of the piece; on the other, they occupy roles within “clan” units, both as musicians and as characters in the drama. In each case, they are “recombining bits of previously behaved behaviors” in ways that are framed and thus “heightened” (28). Precisely because it is “marked, framed, and separate” (28), restored behavior is, Schechner argues, amenable to rehearsal, transmission, and transformation. Further, it operates by codes that must be interpreted by other participants and observers. Thus, when I woke up in my tent in the cold pre-dawn to play the “aubade” (a genre of morning music) across a misty lake on my flute, it was not merely an aesthetic action but, as everyone in the project understood, a signal to begin a sequence of morning rituals involving silence, movement, and food.14 Invoking my dual role as participant and ethnographer in the Wolf Project brings me to another point about liminality: as ethnomusicologists, we too are often in “betwixt and between” states. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull argues that field experience could itself be considered as a “liminal condition” ([1961] 1990: 76), one in which the ethnographer occupies the margin between subjective and objective experience. Dan Bendrups (2000) goes further to posit liminality itself as an ethical stance to be taken by the ethnomusicologist. Writing in the context of studying Latin American popular music in Australia, he argues that fieldwork should be conducted from a liminal perspective that is both intercultural and intersubjective. (I will return to this idea in my discussions below of Dwight Conquergood and performative ethnography.) Dunja Njaradi has critiqued Turner and Schechner’s model of social drama and/as ­aesthetic performance, noting that conceiving of rituals from different cultural contexts in terms of Western drama is a colonizing move that flattens difference (2013: 25). Indeed, I  have identified just such colonial aspects in Schafer’s ritual music drama, with its ­eclectic appropriation of world mythologies, especially the symbols and stories of Indigenous peoples in

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Canada (Waterman 2001). In later writings, Schechner was careful to qualify his “infinity” model of social drama and performance to state that “each social drama, each aesthetic drama (or other kind of performance), [should] be understood in its specific cultural and historical circumstances” (2003: 68); even so, performance is clearly far too slippery and complex to fit neatly within a single organizational model.15 Without specifically using Turner’s and Schechner’s terminology, some ethnomusicologists have deployed the idea of the margin as the main site of their ethnographic investigations. A notable example of this approach is the edited volume Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Madrid 2011). In the book’s introduction, Madrid notes that borders “define political struggles” and emphasize “difference,” not only at their physical sites, but through the embodied practices with which they are associated. In singing, performing, dancing, and political activities, bodies not only cross but are crossed by borders; their “very act of embodying culture performs the borderlands themselves” (9). Borders perform multiple roles: Madrid notes that, over time, the concept of the US/­Mexico border has shifted “from area of contention to separating line to welcoming portal and to cultural buffer” (2). Ultimately, he argues, the border is “racialized to contain the Other” (3). ­ uidity The concept of liminality, then, has become a broader (border) term to express the fl of identity and the power struggles inherent in its construction. As the previous examples show, ethnography and performance are often co-constitutive. In a brilliant essay on the keyword “performance,” Kapchan succinctly maps this effect: Both [performance and ethnography] are framed activities concerned with giving meaning to experience. … Performance, like ethnography, is palpable, arising in worlds of sense and symbol. Ethnography, like performance, is intersubjective, depending on an audience, a community or group to which it is responsible, however heterogeneous the participants may be. In its concern with a self-critical methodology that takes account of its effects in the world, ethnography is first and foremost performative—aware of itself as a living script in which meaning is emergent. (1995: 483–84) The affinity between ethnography and performance has been richly developed in the work of Dwight Conquergood (1949–2004), who was one of the founding members of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Performance Ethnography and the Ethics of Engaged Ethnographic Praxis Begun in 1984, Northwestern’s department was the second such unit to be developed, and its focus differed substantially from the one at New York University. Growing out of the confluence of communication studies, theatre, and oral interpretation, ­Northwestern’s approach to performance studies has long been identified with the practice of performance ethnography: staging performances based on ethnographic field materials. It is not surprising then, that Conquergood’s work emphasizes the importance of embodied performance over text, not only as a matter of intellectual preference but as an ethics of engaged ethnographic praxis. For him, performance should be considered in part as “a tactics of intervention, an alternative space of struggle” (2002: 152). Conquergood’s fieldwork took place in diverse settings around the world, and his output includes academic writing, documentary films, and his own performances of oral narratives collected from the field ([1998] 2013: 58). His work has much to offer ethnomusicology, particularly at this moment when activist scholarship and the ethics of applied ethnomusicology are gaining increasing attention.

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Building on the work of Paul Rabinow and others, Conquergood’s understanding of ethnographic praxis as performance is part of his sustained critique of positivistic approaches in the social sciences and their emphasis on empirical observation and verifiability over interpretation ([1986] 2013: 16–7). Much influenced by Turner’s idea of culture as social drama, Conquergood instead posits a “performance paradigm that prevents the reification of culture into variables to be isolated, measured, and manipulated” ([1986] 2013: 17). In his 1986 essay “Performing Cultures: Ethnography, Epistemology, and Ethics,” Conquergood invokes an idea from anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), that the productive relationship between fieldworker and informant is predicated on their mutual willingness to pretend that they belong to “the same cultural universe” (21).16 Geertz characterizes this not as falseness but as “anthropological irony” (1968: 152), a stance that, in Conquergood’s reading of Geertz, helps the anthropologist to avoid “the assumption of easy identification with the Other” (Conquergood ([1986] 2013: 21). This performative view appeals to Conquergood because it highlights the interdependence of ethnographer and informant as “co-actors, mutually engaged collaborators in a fragile fiction” (21). Conquergood’s early work used Geertz to attack positivism and theorize the collaborative nature of fieldwork, but in the later part of his career, he forwarded this project by critiquing Geertz. In an argument laid out in “Beyond the Text” ([1998] 2013) and amplified in the much cited “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research” (2002), Conquergood critiques Geertz’s fieldwork-as-reading model, famously articulated in the claim that “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz 1973: 452 qtd. in Conquergood [1998] 2013: 51). Reducing culture to texts not only privileges those who have access to literacy, Conquergood argues, but fails to acknowledge the use of texts as tools of domination in contexts ranging from legal systems to colonial administration, policing, and industry. If we want to understand the experience of subordinated people, we must attend to their embodied performances of resistance in everyday life—ones that are not easily reduced to the status of text. This idea is much influenced by Michel de Certeau’s analysis of the agency of subordinated groups, the “makeshift creativity” that is a product of living on the margins of society (1984: xiv, 29 qtd. in Conquergood [1995] 2013: 27). For Conquergood, the stakes here are very real: he insists that, the state of emergency under which many people live demands that we pay attention to messages that are coded and encrypted; to indirect, nonverbal, and extralinguistic modes of communication where subversive meanings and utopian yearnings can be sheltered and shielded from surveillance. (2002: 148) Conquergood created staged performances based on his ethnographic fieldwork with Hmong and Lau refugees in Chicago. For him, such performances were both epistemological, a “way of deeply sensing the other,” and a form of advocacy, which he understood to be a natural extension of the role of the ethnographer ([1985] 2013: 68). A full discussion of the tensions between participation and appropriation in performing another’s culture is beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can observe that performances of this kind resonate strongly with the discipline of ethnomusicology. Beginning with Mantle Hood’s notion of “bi-musicality” (1960), ethnomusicologists have often performed the music of the cultures they study. Indeed, playing in various “world music” ensembles is part of many ethnomusicologists’ training (T. Solis 2004). Performance ethnography, however, goes beyond acquiring cultural knowledge and expertise; it is a form of embodied knowing. As the sociologist Norman Denzin (2003: 6) explains, “performance approaches to knowing insist

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on immediacy and involvement. They consist of partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent understandings.” Advancing themes such as this in the language of the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981; see also Meizel and Daughtry, this volume), Conquergood sums this position up with the term “dialogical performance” ([1985] 2013: 70). Like many others, I have found these ideas to resonate with my own work. As a scholar-­ practitioner, many of my most penetrating insights about experimental and creative improvised musics have come from my participation in those performance practices, a deep immersion that includes my graduate training and my career as a professional musician. As an ­ethnomusicologist, I am committed to Conquergood’s ideal of dialogical performance, whose aim is to “bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another” ([1985] 2013: 75). In writing about questions of subjectivity in intercultural improvisation, I described ­improvisation as a kind of dialogism-in-action. Certainly, I have experienced the sensation of existential (ex)change in the heat of improvisation, when the sonic gestures of another player provoke an unexpected reaction in my body. Vibrations absorbed by receptive ears are translated through nerves, fingers, mouth, and breath. New timbres and sonic effects emerge in response; my vocabulary of expression is enriched and my playing is forever changed. (2016: 286) Like many ethnomusicologists, I believe that embodied musicking is itself a form of knowledge production. I understand my creative improvisation to be a form of performance ethnography, one that is performed in musical dialogue rather than through the interpretation of oral narrative. In a secondary act of interpretation, such as in the passage quoted above, I employ performative writing to evoke the “immediacy and particularity” of the musical exchange (Kisliuk 2000: 29). Improvising with my research participants is a reciprocal exchange that demands openness and respect, but it is not always easy or comfortable, since it involves human egos and the negotiation of difference. The knowledge produced through that musical exchange is both situated and contingent: it is dialogical in Bakhtin’s sense of the word, as the constant interaction of meanings, each of which may condition the others in the moment of utterance (1981: 462). Indeed, Conquergood’s emphases on “process, change, improvisation, and struggle” ([1998] 2013: 56) situate both ethnography and performance as performative. This move from performance to the performative requires unpacking. For Conquergood, creating staged productions from ethnographic field materials ­a llows us to understand performance as a socio-political act that requires a radical new c­ onception of ethnography. Here, he follows German anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s call for a turn “from informative to performative ethnography” (1990: 3), and he describes this turn as an ­ethnography of “the ears and heart that reimagines p­ articipant-observation as ­co-performative witnessing” (Conquergood 2002: 149). In this context, participant o ­ bservation is a key ­ethnographic methodology whereby researchers participate in the ­language, customs, and expressive practices of a group, usually for a considerable period of time. Famously ­championed and developed by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (e.g. 1922), ­participant-observation fieldwork methods were an important corrective to ­armchair anthropology and ethnomusicology.17 Co-performative witnessing goes further. It breaks down the hierarchy between researcher and research participant, and understands ­ethnographic research as, itself, a kind of performance that articulates what performance studies scholar Soyini Madison calls “soundscapes of power” (2007: 827). Recently, the concept of co-performative witnessing has been taken up by ­Deborah Wong (2017), who views Conquergood as a major influence on her work (personal communication).

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Wong is a long-time member of the Riverside Coalition for Police Accountability, and her political activism has come to overlap with her ethnomusicological research. In a fascinating essay on one “soundscape of power,” Wong discusses an incident of fatal police brutality that was captured by the audio belt-recorders worn by police officers in Riverside to monitor their interactions with the public. In the essay, Wong exposes both the potential and the limits of co-performative witnessing, as she attempts to advocate for a victim of police brutality through a performative act of listening. Police officers are supposed to turn on their audio belt-recorders when dealing with suspects and to submit the timestamped recordings at the end of their shifts. The recordings are only transcribed if they are required as evidence. Asking critical questions about the fatal incident, Wong treats the police department’s practices of transcription as a kind of performance and explores the way the representation of events is mediated by the original lo-fi recording and the chaotic circumstances (running, shouting, fighting) in which it was made. She also interrogates her own acts of listening to the tapes and reading the transcripts: “As with all evidence of trauma, we are instantly part of a dynamic loop of witness and voyeurism, participants in spectacularized acts of looking … and hearing” (272). Citing Diana Taylor’s work on the problem of being “caught in the spectacle,” Wong maintains that those who witness injustice have a responsibility to share their knowledge (Taylor 1997: 25 qtd in Wong 2017: 272). Further, she connects this responsibility to Conquergood’s argument that “performance studies offers its ‘most radical intervention’ by unsettling and collapsing the text versus performance distinction as a false divide that nonetheless gets played out as ‘epistemic violence’” (Conquergood 2002: 148, 151 qtd. in Wong 2017: 273). For Wong, then, performative ethnography (the product of co-performative witnessing) is a self-reflexive and critical process.18 To understand how ethnomusicologists have taken up performative ethnography, however, we need to take a closer look at theories of performativity. Performative Ethnography and Critical Theories of Subjectivity Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s critique of J. L. Austin (Derrida [1972] 1982), Judith Butler’s notion of performativity has become central for theoretical work on the way discourse produces particular forms of subjectivity, such as gender identities or racial identities. Recall Austin’s idea, discussed above, of performative speech utterances that enact the condition they name. Derrida critiqued Austin’s dismissal of unhappy performatives, those “hollow” or “void” (Austin [1962] 1995: 22) speech acts that occur in fictional contexts such as ­theatre. When uttered by an actor in a play, “I now pronounce you husband and wife” does not enact a legal marriage. Looking more closely at this, Derrida pointed out that a speech act’s “general iterability” (1982: 325)—the fact that each citation of a linguistic sign contains an alteration of meaning that is only possible because it is also already r­ ecognizable—is ­precisely what invests that act with power. We only understand the performative pronouncement of marriage in the play because the formula is repeatedly used in “real” life, and the meaning of speech acts accrue through their repetition, rehearsal, and citation within a given social context. Butler built on Derrida’s analysis to argue that gender and sex have no existence outside their performance in everyday embodied practices (1990, 1993). We perform gender, for example, through countless, often unconscious, performative acts of speech, gesture, and physical adornment, which work to reinforce (or alternatively to transgress) social norms. Such acts are fundamentally embedded in discourse and achieve their business by “citing” previous performances of gender subjectivity. Crucially, this is citation with no original; gender is not a biological fact but a social construct. It is important to note that Butlerian performativity is not a theory of individual agency; gender is not simply something we freely choose to perform. For example, I may choose to

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perform “masculinity” through my clothes and behavior, but my performance of masculinity will not save me from a patriarchal system that pays women less than men for work of equal value. Butler’s conception of performativity highlights the potential for transformation inherent within imperfect or resistant citation; she describes the performance of gender as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint” (2004: 1). If identity is fluid and potentially transgressive, Butler cautions, it is also constrained by, and subject to reprisal from, the social codes through which it is constituted (Butler and McMullen 2016). Such reprisals can be deadly serious, as seen, for example, in state violence against queer and transgender people. Butler has developed the concept of performativity in other contexts, notably, hate speech (1997), and she has married her theoretical work with activist projects around gender, sexuality, race, and class issues. In sum, Butlerian performativity is a powerful conceptual tool for the critical theorization of subjectivity. (For a further discussion of Butler, see Sugarman, [this volume].) Performativity has been particularly influential in feminist and queer performance studies, where its critical force has been extended and nuanced (Parker and Sedgwick 1995a). One important example is found in the writings of José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013), whose work is much influenced by German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch’s “principle of hope” (1988, 1995). In Cruising Utopia (2009), Muñoz argues that “queerness is a horizon” (32)—a ­potential subjectivity, and thus a mode of possibility, that is not yet achieved precisely because it currently exists under violent conditions of social constraint.19 In his analysis of the Los Angeles punk scene (both from his own experience and as represented through artist Kevin McCarty’s pictures of punk venues), Muñoz theorizes the power of performance for audiences. What queer punk youth find on the literal stages of punk performance has everything to do with recognition, belonging, and a sense of potentiality, which Muñoz, building on the work of Jill Dolan (2002, 2005), characterized as utopian p­ erformativity (99). For Muñoz, “the real force of performance is its ability to generate a modality of knowing and recognition among audiences and groups that facilitates modes of belonging, especially ­m inoritarian belonging” (99). This conception of performativity is clearly more agential than Butler’s and points to the yearning for social and political efficacy that underwrites much performative ethnography. At this point, it is important to emphasize that the notion of performativity has a usage in performance studies beyond the critical theories of subjectivity described above. Richard Schechner devotes a chapter to this key word in his influential book Performance Studies (2003), tracing the genealogy of this idea from its roots in speech act theory to its development by scholars in the intellectual movements known as post-structuralism and post-modernism. (On post-structuralism and performativity, see Sugarman [this volume]; on post-modernism, see Manuel [this volume].) Schechner claims that, “performativity is everywhere—in daily behavior, in the professions, on the internet and media, in the arts, and in language” (110). In this sense, the word “performative” is both a noun and an adjective, and Schechner develops his ideas about this term as part of his larger argument that the Internet age has brought about a collapse of difference between “theatre” and “real life.” He locates examples of performativity in reality television shows (112), the use of computer simulation in military training (122), and the rise of performance art (137). He agrees with Butler that identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are socially constructed, but he understands performativity simply to mean any action, event, or thing that behaves “like a performance” (110). Arguably, Schechner’s broad conception of performativity robs it of some of its critical force. Ethnomusicologists committed to performative ethnography adopt a definition of performativity that owes more to the critical praxis outlined (in different ways) by Conquergood and Butler than it does to Schechner. For example, the values of reciprocity, critical

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reflexivity, and social activism are apparent in the work of Kisliuk (2008), Hahn (2007), and Wong (2008). Performative ethnography puts a new emphasis on the sharing of experience between ethnographers and the people with whom they work, and entails a deep immersion in the expressive practices being analyzed. Since the doing produces the knowing, performative ethnography is itself a reflexive and critical praxis. As a result, it may blur the boundaries between (and hierarchy of ) researcher/research participant (Kisliuk 2008). It takes seriously the embodied experience gained through practice (for fieldworker and research participant alike) and treats performance itself as knowledge producing. By paying close attention to the particularities of situated performances of music and dance, and presenting richly detailed descriptions in ethnographic writing, it seeks to “show” rather than “tell” (Wong 2008: 85). Performative ethnography often engages with autoethnography, the ethnographic method of using experiences from one’s own life as ethnographic data (Reed-Danahay 1997), and places a premium on critical reflexivity (Wong 2008). In doing so, it moves away from Turnbull’s conception of fieldwork as a liminal and transformative practice ([1961] 1990); instead, it emphasizes states of disorientation/reorientation in fieldwork (Wong 2008: 87; Hahn 2007) and points toward a rejection of the idea of a unitary self in favor of more contingent notions of subjectivity. Further, it is a “politicized practice” through which ethnographers seek to reveal the relationship between performance and power (Wong 2008: 87). Finally, performative ethnography focuses critical attention on the media in which ethnographic work is communicated (e.g. writing or film), treating ethnographic representation as an expressive translation practice, which Kisliuk understands as a “meta-performance” (2008: 193).20 Kisliuk, Hahn, and Wong have all made significant contributions to performative ­ethnography in ethnomusicology. For three decades, Michelle Kisliuk (1988, 1998, 2000) has been working to integrate ethnomusicology and performance studies by combining “narrative ethnography” with detailed attention to specific performances and making ­important connections between aesthetic and social practice and broader theoretical and political issues (1998: 13). Her book Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (1998) includes narrative description, musical transcription, and astute analysis. It also includes some of her poetry that emerged from her field experiences. Kisliuk privileges situated performance and stories of individual people as a counterpoise to previous systematic and totalizing studies of Central African forest people, which represented them as “hermetic and quintessential” (12). For Kisliuk, a “fully performative ethnography” must contain at least three braided conversations: (1) ongoing conversations between the researcher and her participants; (2) the researcher’s “conversations” with the “experiences and materials” of performance; and (3) the ethnography, which she conceives as a “metaconversation” among the ethnographer, the reader, and the materials and ideas discussed (2000: 29). Such conversations, Kisliuk points out, always take place in a context of historically situated and shifting power dynamics (29). Tomie Hahn’s Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (2007) explores how the nihon buyo dance genre is passed from one generation of dancers to the next through embodied knowledge that is transmitted, in part, through direct physical contact with the teacher. Hahn’s voice and body are “ever-present” in the text (18), which takes an intersensory approach to performance: we see, feel, and listen to Hahn learning nihon buyo, which is amplified by an accompanying DVD that presents examples of visual, tactile, and oral transmission. Like Kisliuk, Hahn’s ethnographic writing is filled with performative interventions, including “orientation” passages that provide sensory thought experiments for the reader. The first orientation, for example, explores the question “How do we write the body into text?” by asking the reader to imagine “taking a drink of water from a glass as a performance” (19). More than an exercise in methodology, these orientations draw

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upon and extend the ideas developed in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a classic analysis of colonialism that acknowledges the power dynamics inherent in European encounters with cultural others (Hahn 2007: 18).21 Hahn’s performative “orientations” are designed to dis-orient and to “sensually outfit” the reader (17), who thus becomes another kind of performer in engaging with the text. As a bi-racial scholar-practitioner, Hahn engages directly with embodied experience (her own, that of other nihon buyo dancers, and those of her readers) as “sensual orientations and lived experiences of transmission” (13). We have already explored Deborah Wong’s recent articulation of the role of the researcher as witness, and her commitment to an activist form of performative ethnography runs throughout her writings. In Speak It Louder, her much-cited book on Asian American musical performance (2004), the performativity/performance dyad moves beyond its epistemological concern with being something and explores the more explicitly activist question of how saying something can be doing something (to paraphrase Parker and Sedgwick 1995a: 16; on the relationship between performance and performativity, see Spiller 2014). Wong explains that her research on Japanese American taiko drumming stemmed from her visceral reaction to seeing it performed and her subsequent immersion in learning it. “Hearing taiko made me want to be able to do it,” she writes, “… made me want to be strong and loud like those Asian American musicians I so admired” (2004: 195). Wong has deeply explored the dynamics of migration, generation, material culture, collectivity, and subjectivity in North ­A merican taiko, working out from her own immersion in the practice and her relationships with the taiko community in Southern California to critical, historical, and ethnographic research (2004, 2016, 2019). In work closely allied to the critical scholarship on race (see Mahon, this volume), Wong explores the ways in which contemporary taiko performance articulates new ways of being Japanese American and Asian American. Of course, situated performances of music don’t have the power to transform a society’s race relations, and Wong cautions against locating a “simpleminded politics of empowerment” in performance (2004: 6). Performative ethnography, she argues, must focus not only on what performance does but on “the all too real fissures that can be created through performance, when making and unmaking [of social relations, such as those of race/ethnicity] meet” (6). Performance studies is a diverse field that offers abundant possibilities for immersive, ­creative, and analytical work on situated practice. Related themes are present in the field of critical improvisation studies (CIS). As Rebecca Caines and Ajay Heble have observed (2015), both share a common concern for questions of “liveness, responsibility, i­ntermediality, ­collaboration and community, critical listening, risk-taking, and experimentation” (5). Across its widely interdisciplinary spectrum of inquiry, CIS is invested in discovering both what improvisation “is” and what it “does” in the world. In the following section, I provide a brief overview of CIS and discuss the contributions of ethnomusicologists there, with particular attention to improvisation as social theory.

Critical Improvisation Studies Begun in the early twenty-first century, CIS is an emergent field of inquiry that has, nevertheless, already had a significant impact on interdisciplinary scholarship.22 As a scholarpractitioner, I found it tremendously exciting to have been involved in the birth of a new field, one in which theories and methods are still being explored and developed. Perhaps because it is still so new, defining CIS is quite difficult. For Heble, who directs the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), the field is impelled by an ethical and social impetus that was profoundly inspired by experimental forms of improvised music that began in North America and Europe in the 1960s. These include free jazz and free improvisation—forms of musical practice that encourage individual voices to speak

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(and be listened to) within a relatively non-hierarchical, democratic group dynamic. An ­A fro-diasporic ­music that has been highly influential, free jazz developed in tandem with the American Civil Rights movement.23 Heble emphasizes how this music was entangled with African ­A merican struggles for “equality” and “self-representation” (2000: 6). Extrapolating from this example, he and other CIS scholars have argued that certain forms of musical improvisation offer productive models for envisioning a more egalitarian society (6). A key word for Heble is “dissonance,” and he is especially interested in “cultural practices that are out of tune with orthodox habits of coherence and judgment—[that occasion] a disturbance to naturalized orders of knowledge production” (9). Dissonance, here, expresses Heble’s (and others’) utopian belief that improvisation has the potential to produce social change. From the beginning, scholarship and aesthetic practice have been closely linked in CIS. For example, Heble’s conception of the field was partly formed by his decades of experience as an improvising pianist and as the artistic director of the Guelph Jazz Festival. He observed that musicians with different styles and backgrounds, often with no common language and meeting for the first time at a sound check, could nevertheless make extraordinary music together because of their sensitive ability to listen and respond in the moment. For Heble, improvisation is above all a social practice, and this has direct implications for the work of IICSI. Under his direction, the Institute has sought to create “positive social change through the confluence of improvisational arts, innovative scholarship, and collaborative action” (Heble n.d.). George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut have argued that although CIS benefitted from the early leadership of musician-scholars, improvisation is a fundamental part of social life and should be more broadly conceptualized (2016b: 1–2). Ideas from the field are as applicable to emergency management (Kendra and Wachtendorf 2007) and organization science (Weick 1998; Barrett, 2012) as they are to music. On this view, CIS “seeks to examine improvisation’s effects, interrogate its discourses, interpret narratives and histories related to it, discover implications of those narratives and histories, and uncover its ontologies” (2016b: 3). Writ broadly, CIS sees improvisation in expressive culture as symbolic of a social world that is, itself, inherently improvisational (13). A fascinating example of this is Sara Ramshaw’s (2013) analysis of improvisation in the law. She argues that there are many unknown and unpredictable elements in the courtroom. The law is not absolute but subject to argument, negotiation, and interpretation. Courtroom lawyers are adversaries whose actions and responses are not entirely predictable, and performing as a lawyer requires good improvisation skills. Lawyers must think on their feet, listen actively, and respond in the moment. Judges, too, must navigate among precedent, arguments, defendants, and aggrieved parties in applying the law in specific circumstances. Working with improvising musicians, Ramshaw has even developed an improvisational game called Hydra, inspired by John Zorn’s game piece Cobra (1984), to teach law students how to become better improvisers (Ramshaw et al. 2017).24 It is fair to say that music is to CIS what theatre and oral narrative are to performance studies—an initial impetus that has excited attention and activity in many arenas. Scholars working on music and CIS are located in diverse fields, including performance studies (Caines 2016), literature (Heble 2002; Fischlin and Heble 2004a; Siddall 2016; Wallace 2012), philosophy (Peters 2009; Nicholls 2012; E. Lewis 2019), psychology (Sawyer 2003, 2011), computer science (Dean 2003), social aesthetics (Born, Lewis, and Straw 2017), and human rights (Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz 2013). It is not only the disciplinary roots of CIS that are diverse; approaches found within the field are varied as well. For example, while a substantial body of work in CIS aligns with Heble and sees improvisation as a model for ethics or politics, this perspective is not universal, and scholars have a range of positions on this topic. The level of focus varies as well, with some scholars examining the specificity

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of situated aesthetic practices and others developing broad ideas about the ubiquity of improvisation across individuals, systems, and institutions. Given the sheer breadth of work that takes place within CIS, my approach in this section has, by necessity, been selective.25 Ethnomusicology, Music, and Critical Improvisation Studies Since the field’s inception, many of the scholars who have been involved in CIS have come from ethnomusicology or closely allied disciplines,26 and a number of these have concerned themselves with theorizing the social aesthetics (artistic processes analyzed as and through social relations) of Afro-diasporic and/or intercultural improvisation. For example, trombonist, composer, computer music innovator, and scholar George Lewis has critiqued the general erasure of race from discourses of experimental music ([1996] 2004; 2004). He provides a stunning corrective to this tendency in his definitive ethnography of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (2008), which is discussed further below. Lewis’s foundational contributions to CIS include his insistence on analyses that examine the interaction of multiple forms of identity and a nuanced understanding of the performative nature of improvisation. (On the notion of intersectionality, see Mahon [this volume], and Sugarman [this volume].) Another important work in this area is Ingrid Monson’s Saying Something, a fine-grained semiotic analysis of jazz music in 1990s New York. Monson compares the embodied practice of improvisation to the everyday act of conversation, and she emphasizes that in both situations, improvised interactions may involve affinity (e.g. when two people in a conversation finish each other’s sentences) as well as contest (e.g. “negotiations or struggles for control of musical space”; Monson 1996: 80). (On Monson’s use of semiotics, see ­Beaster-Jones, this volume.) Discourse theory and practice theory are employed in her book Freedom Sounds (2007), an analysis of the role of jazz in the history of the US civil rights movement. Importantly, Monson insists that “the music ‘itself ’ is not external to a social and political account but rather a central player in the dialogue between art and meaning” (2007: 25). Approaching related ideas from a different fieldsite, Jason Stanyek’s influential theorization of intercultural improvisation (2004), discussed below, is worked through the complex valences of ethnicity and nationalism in Brazilian music (2011). Deborah Wong’s work is relevant to CIS as well, and she devotes a chapter of Speak It Louder to the social aesthetics of Asian American improvisation (2004). She has also analyzed masculinity in the context of taiko improvisation (2016), drawing in part on her own experience as a player and articulating the development of taiko with the transmission of jazz in post-World War II Japan. One thing that all these studies have in common is a commitment to grounding theory in ethnographic or historical research. A scholar-practitioner working at the meeting point of ethnomusicology and CIS, David Borgo’s highly original conception of improvisation examines situated practices as systems (2005, 2016a, 2016b). Taking an ecological approach, Borgo regards systems as “wholes made up of wholes” (2005: 10), by which he means that all of the parts that make up a ­system are “not only interconnected [with one another] but [also that the system in its entirety is] able to maintain its own internal structure and to evolve over time” (10). His book Sync or Swarm (2005), a study of experimental solo, ensemble, and human/machine improvisation, explores the embrace of uncertainty in both musical improvisation and a range of late twentieth-century science disciplines, including cognitive science, physics, and biology. Discussing these connections, Borgo cites mathematician John L. Casti (1994), who describes the emergence of “the Science of Surprise” (Borgo 2005: 1)—theories of chaos and complexity whereby “researchers aim to model spontaneous, self-generating order” and maintain that “irreducibility, irreversibility, and unpredictability are essential

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rather than aberrant behavior in the world” (3). Drawing a comparison to such theories, Borgo ­analyses ensemble improvisation in terms of both the coordination of the musicians’ intentions and energies, which he characterizes as “sync,” and the swarm-like quality that emerges when individual parts are moving in different directions but still form a musical whole with a collective purpose (9). His work contributes to the intellectual movement of systems approaches in music studies and rethinks the nature of subjectivity in terms of distributed agency among musicians, instruments, technology, and space. Other ethnomusicologists in CIS have focused on issues of gender, sexuality, and embodiment. Hahn has explored processes of bodily “orientation and disorientation” in forms of improvisation that involve both technology (Bahn and Hahn 2003) and physical movement (Hahn et al. 2016). Drawing on French feminist theory (Cixous and Clement 1985; Irigaray 1996), the violent erotics of philosopher George Bataille (1962, 1987), and BDSM theory (McKendrick 1999), I outline a feminist ethics of improvisation by examining the extreme performance practice of violist and performance artist Charlotte Hug (Waterman 2009). Hug subjects herself and her viola to harsh environments for extended periods of time (e.g. in a glacier cave and in a torture chamber) in order to explore the complex relationships among instrument, player, space, and place. I discern a complicated intersubjective quality to Hug’s work that resonates with feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray’s dictum “I love to you,” a phrase she uses to describe an ethics of intimacy based on respect for difference and reciprocal listening (1996). In another project, Julie Dawn Smith and I (2013) conducted an ethnography of George Lewis’s “Dream Team,” a quartet that included Lewis on t­ rombone along with pianist Marilyn Crispell, koto player Miya Masaoka, and drummer Hamid Drake. Smith and I juxtapose the feminist psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva with concepts from Butler to analyze the building of a “listening trust” in this reflexively constituted, gender-balanced, and multi-racial ensemble. For example, in my close reading of a performance by the quartet, I use Butler’s ideas to explore both discursive and material instances of performativity in the group’s musical interactions. Part of my project was to trace the limits of performativity in improvisation and ask, “When is saying something not doing ­ merican something?”27 Finally, it is important to note here that the ethnographic work of A Studies scholar Sherrie Tucker is both well known to ethnomusicologists and crucial to CIS. In both Swing Shift (2000), her oral history of female jazz musicians during World War II, and her subsequent book on the social dynamics of the Hollywood Canteen (2014), Tucker unpacks the history and politics of gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century jazz and posits innovative ideas about improvisation and subjectivity. The strain of CIS within music studies has attracted a significant number of scholar-­ practitioners, researchers whose lives as artists deeply inform their thinking about improvisation. For example, jazz pianist Vijay Iyer (2002, 2016) has made important contributions to CIS, and most of the ethnomusicologists discussed above are performers as well as ­scholars. Perhaps the most famous scholar-practitioner in the field is accordionist and ­electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), and the influence of her work (2005, 2010, 2016) on CIS can hardly be overstated. Through her lifelong cross-genre practice of ­improvisation, her adventurous relationship to technology, and her influential philosophy of “Deep ­Listening,” she modeled the ethics of inclusion and co-creation to which many CIS scholars aspire.28 One of her most important contributions will serve as an example of CIS’s profound commitment to applied research. In 2009, Oliveros brought a number of other CIS scholars into a project she had been developing called AUMI (adaptive use musical instrument), an app/instrument for people with disabilities, including those with very limited voluntary mobility. The researchers that she approached included people with disabilities (e.g. students, musicians, dancers, and artists), computer programmers, occupational therapists, and music therapists. AUMI

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is a sampler that exploits the built-in motion capture capability of the cameras on laptop computers and handheld devices. Even the slightest movement on the part of the user can trigger music sounds and samples. The AUMI project is based on the principle that music should be available to, and adapt to, all users, and, for that reason, it is improvisation-based and free to download. Collaborating with a team of colleagues at the University of Kansas, Sherrie Tucker holds a weekly drop-in AUMI jam session at a local library. Participants improvise and record their performances in an inter-ability ensemble context. 29 As Tucker states, working across abilities usefully puts pressure on the social aspirations of CIS because it questions “the unevenly palpable boundaries of the utopian ‘we’ with room for all (except for the unnoticed others who didn’t get in)” (Tucker et al. 2016: 182). AUMI articulates CIS with disability studies, technology, and participant action research in performative, social, and therapeutic contexts, and the project has grown into an international consortium of researchers across several institutions (Oliveros et al. 2011; Tucker et al. 2016; Finch et al. 2016; on disability studies in ethnomusicology, see Meizel and Daughtry, this volume). While the work of scholar-practitioners, applied researchers, and practice-based inquiry is an important part of CIS, the dominant strain of the field, one might argue, is concerned with exploring the relevance of improvisation for social theory. Improvisation and/as Social Theory The idea that improvisation is a generative model for theorizing the social is by no means new. In his sweeping ideological critique, Noise: The Political Economy of Music ([1977] 1985), French economist and social theorist Jacques Attali argues that music has always been a harbinger of social change: in Western society, shifts in the process of musical production presage shifts in society, and these are characterized by the opposing principles of noise and order.30 His analysis of twentieth-century music focuses pessimistically on the idea of “repetition,” by which he means the dominance of recording as the means of producing and circulating music. Music here is symbolic of the conditions of late capitalism: it is a commodity made in surplus quantities by a specialized few and “stockpiled” by consumers, who are alienated from the means of production. In the book’s final chapter, “Composing,” Attali argues that the only hope for a society mired in repetition is to foster creative practices that are not slaves to commercial gain and, instead, return music to “collective play” (141). Significantly, Attali uses the example of African American free jazz, which he sees as “the first attempt to express in economic terms the refusal of the cultural alienation inherent in repetition, to use music to build a new culture” (138). His examples include the short-lived Jazz Composers’ Guild (founded in 1959) and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM, founded in 1965)—organizations created by African American artists to respond to the hegemony of club owners, record companies, and critics, and their resistance to experimental developments in improvised music. 31 As we shall see, the AACM has been particularly resonant for CIS. Building on Attali’s ideas about the relationship between music and society, and drawing inspiration from the musical practices of performers like Sun Ra, William Parker, ­Pauline Oliveros, and René Lussier, Daniel Fischlin and Heble (2004b) make three significant claims for musical improvisation. First, like Attali, they argue that certain kinds of ­experimental musical improvisation serve as potent forms of cultural critique because of their resistance to “co-optation and commodification” (2004b: 5). Such improvisation, they argue, has a “dissonant relation to hegemony” (15). Second, improvisation’s potential for resistance does not primarily come about because it is spontaneous behavior but rather because of its dialogic qualities (9); thus, for example, many forms of Afro-diasporic improvisation express the inter-generational trauma of slavery in terms of rebellion, resilience, and hope

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(Eidsheim and Wong 2016; Lewis [1996] 2004; Lipsitz 2015). An important touchstone for this argument is the idea that improvisation is a performance of the self—a ­performance that is actually audible in the music, born of one’s experience and ideas, a “process of finding one’s own sound” (Lewis 2004: 5). Third, precisely because improvisation brings the past to bear on the immediate present to imagine a new kind of future, it is a generative principle for “thinking alternatives” (musical, social, communitarian, and theoretical), ones that oppose conventional ideas that “circumscribe the limits of human potentiality” ­(Fischlin and Heble 2004b: 10). Building on this work, Fischlin, Heble, and George Lipsitz (2013) have analyzed case studies of Afro-diasporic improvisation and its historical connection to human rights activism to extend the argument that musical improvisation can model an ethics of ­co-creation.32 They argue that improvising equips people to activate “their agency publicly and in relation to others … . [Moreover,] improvisers have to be aware of the needs of others. They must recognize problems rapidly and invent solutions immediately” (2013: xv). Fischlin, Heble, and Lipsitz generate social theory by observing the microsocial details of improvisation, in which musicians must listen actively and respond in the moment, an intersubjective mode that requires both risk taking and trust building. Here, improvisation is understood as both a methodology and an ethics; by becoming empathetic listeners who recognize and respect difference, we can create more equitable modes of sociality. “Securing rights of all sorts,” they argue, “requires people to hone their capacities to act in the world, capacities that flow from improvisation” (xi). This frankly utopian strand of CIS is inspired by powerful historical examples, the AACM chief among them. Founded over fifty years ago in Chicago’s then racially segregated South Side, and still going strong, the AACM has made important contributions to experimental and improvised ­ nthony ­Braxton, music. Members include such venerable artists as Muhal Richard Abrams, A Roscoe Mitchell, Amina Claudine Myers, Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry ­Threadgill. Known for its “radical collective democracy” (G. Lewis 2004: 7), the AACM rejected the commercially and stylistically bounded term “jazz” in favor of the term “Great Black ­Music,” thus simultaneously marking out a politics of race and refusing to be limited to any particular genre category. As Jackson and Abrams wrote in 1973, the AACM was more than a musical collective. It was founded to demonstrate how “the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom” (72, qtd in Lewis 2004: 9).33 In his comprehensive history and ethnography, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and Experimental Music (2008), George Lewis (himself a lifelong member of the group) articulates the creative contributions of the AACM with their institutional organization and activism in the wake of the Black Power movement. “[T]he AACM,” he argues, “provides a successful example of collective working-class self-help and s­elf-determination; encouragement of difference in viewpoint, aesthetics, ideology, spirituality, and methodologies; and the promulgation of new cooperative, rather than competitive, relationships between artists” (2008: x–xi). One practical example of the AACM’s social innovation is its free music school, where members volunteer their expertise to teach young musicians. AACM members have been lauded internationally, from the flamboyant and eclectic Art Ensemble of Chicago, which grew out of the AACM and turned Parisian jazz on its head in 1969, to pathbreaking flutist/composer/bandleader Nicole Mitchell, who enjoys the distinction of having been the AACM’s first woman president (2009–2010).34 Devoting meticulous attention to the creative and social contributions of the AACM and setting them within a broader analysis of the politics of race, Lewis’s book provides an important corrective to the historical masking of African Americans in the narrative of American musical experimentalism (see also Lewis [1996] 2004 and 2004). It also demonstrates the complex ways in which the aesthetic and the social are co-constituted in improvised music.

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The idea of improvisation as social theory has also been developed in the context of intercultural encounter. Jason Stanyek (2004) examines this topic in his discussion of the late 1940s Pan-Africanist musical collaborations between African American trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Dizzy Gillespie and Afro-Cuban conguero and composer Chano Pozo. Widely influential in culture and politics, Pan-Africanism is an intellectual movement that posits elements of solidarity among all people of African descent (see ­Esedebe 1994). Like the authors discussed above, Stanyek focuses on musical ­co-creation but within an intercultural methodology distinguished by two elements: “1) their [the musicians’] ability to juxtapose different histories without sacrificing identity and 2) their reflexive use of notions of cultural difference as a basis for collaboration” (2004: 89). For Stanyek, the face-to-face contact of intercultural improvisation distinguishes it from cultural borrowing or hybrid musicking; more important than “evocations of Africa” in Pan-African jazz, he argues, is the musicians’ ability to “communicate and create in spite of extreme differences,” such as those of musical style, language, history, and culture (91). The heterogeneity of intercultural improvisation, he argues, models new ways of bridging difference, of “engaging with those things that separate us” (118) to arrive at a consensus, however temporary and contingent. But is the result of such engagement necessarily consensus, and is consensus always the most desirable musical or social outcome? In my interviews with the intercultural trio Safa (Amir Koushkani, tar [a long-necked lute]; François Houle, clarinet; and Sal Ferreras, percussion), I found a deep contradiction between the musicians’ fervent expressions of unity (something they experience on a musical and spiritual level) and their individual accounts of what makes their music tick (Waterman 2016). For example, in a performance of the ­Persian tasnif (song) “Whisper of Love,” Ferreras laid down a groove on the udu (clay pot drum) with strong accents and ghosted beats. In a feedback interview, ­Koushkani described the rhythm as additive, which is typical in Persian music, while Ferreras insisted that his Latin, syncopated duple feel was crucial to the piece. The musicians attributed these differences in interpretation to their individual autonomy within the group, described by Ferreras as a “triangulated translation game” (302), and this corresponds with Stanyek’s analysis of heterogeneity as a positive attribute of intercultural improvisation. A focus group of audience members, however, interpreted the performance as an example of recognition, the technique of multiculturalism famously described by philosopher Charles Taylor (1994). Taylor argues that only when a pluralistic society properly acknowledges the particular needs of minority groups can such citizens feel a genuine sense of belonging. The problem with recognition, however, is that it is a gift bestowed by the powerful on the subaltern, and it comes with assimilationist strings attached (see, for example, Coulthard 2007; ­K amboureli 2009). These audience members heard the Iranian-born Koushkani as intriguingly exotic, leading them on an imaginary excursion to Persia. They also approved of his falling back to make space for Houle to improvise, a standard ensemble technique but one that they perceived as evidence of suitable humility on the part of an immigrant to Canada. In the context of controversial Canadian multicultural policies that seek to manage and contain difference, the assumptions behind this interpretation are more than a little disturbing. Additional work is needed in CIS on the crucial role of listening—by audiences as well as performers and critics—in improvisation. Furthermore, we need to pay close attention to instances of improvisation that are “unsuccessful,” such as those in which communication breaks down. How, for example, are we to understand those moments of improvisation, aesthetic or social, that involve violence? What would the social aesthetics of deliberate and strategic dissensus look and sound like? Scholars like Gillian Siddall (2016), Danielle ­Goldman (2010), and Keavy Martin and Dylan Robinson (2016) have begun to explore these questions, but further research is required. This is not to critique the project

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of theorizing the social through the close examination of improvised music in situated cultural and historical context, but rather to call for a more complete analysis. Anthropologist Georgina Born has suggested one such approach. In recent theoretical works, Born (2012, 2017) has delineated four planes of social mediation in music: (1) the microsocial elements of performance and practice; (2) m ­ usic’s power to enact imagined communities (affinity groups based on “musical and other identifications”); (3) music’s ability to refract wider social relations (such as nation, class, race, religion, gender, and sexuality); and (4) the relationship between music and the “broader institutional forces” through which it is produced, reproduced, and transformed (e.g. ­m arkets, ­patronage, and cultural institutions) (2017: 43). Of course, any number of ­ethnomusicological and sociological studies of music have focused on one or more of these planes. Born’s view, however, is that too much attention has been paid to the ­m icrosocial plane when, instead, we need to consider music as a constellation or assemblage: “an ­a ggregation of sonic, visual, d­ iscursive, social, corporeal, technological, and temporal mediations” (44).35 Designing empirical studies that move through and across these four planes, she suggests, will bring the social and material aspects of musical analysis together (44). Importantly, Born highlights the role of power here, insisting that a thorough ­account of the negotiation of difference in pluralistic societies, with the possibility of dissensus instead of consensus, is integral to analysis (46). Born turns this critical perspective on her autoethnographic account of the Feminist Improvising Group (FIG), an iconic, experimental, all-women ensemble founded in London in 1977. FIG included important figures in free improvisation, such as vocalist Maggie Nichols and pianist Irène Schweizer. Born herself played cello and bass guitar in the group. Analyzing the ensemble’s work, she describes an anarchic and playful performance practice informed by feminist politics, one that subversively riffed on the ordinary domestic activities expected of women at the time (2017: 53). As Born points out, FIG’s musicking refracted the complexities of gender and sexuality politics in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s, their experiences performing in an overwhelmingly male musical environment, and the institutional prejudice they encountered as a result (e.g. a hostile reception by music critics). Far from painting a picture of solidarity, however, Born confesses that, the uncomfortable (antiessentialist) truth is that even when all performers were women, and all were informed by feminist and, often, lesbian feminist politics, the creation of hierarchical, competitive, or exclusionary musical socialities in performance could still occur and could sometimes even be pronounced. (54) FIG’s “first plane” microsocialities of performance consciously refracted “third plane” social relations of gender and sexuality. This refraction, however, was “doubled” by the members’ own subjection to gendered social relations, both as women and as musicians and improvisers (54). Born describes their affective reach (third plane) as “a fuzzy operation under the sign of the feminisms and lesbianisms of the time,” while critics were bemused and antagonized by their “ambiguous, possibly feigned ‘incompetencies’” (55). Like most improvising ensembles of this period, they survived by getting small public grants and gigs (fourth plane) (55). FIG might seem to fit Attali’s contemporaneous ideal of returning music to “collective play” ([1977] 1985: 141). Born, however, is highly critical of Attali’s “reductive” approach to social analysis because it attributes too much symbolic weight to particular musical activities (2017: 44–45). Her analysis is a fascinating counterpoint to the more utopian strands of CIS, but it is, I think, congruent with Heble’s interest in dissonance.

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Improvisation, like performance more generally, is complex behavior, not amenable to neat categorization, and this is precisely why it is good to think with. CIS provides novel ways to theorize the aesthetic and the social as co-constitutive and dynamical. *** Engaged in a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars from the fields of performance studies and critical improvisation studies, ethnomusicologists have developed diverse theories and methodologies to study situated practice. From the analysis of social aesthetics, to the development of applied and practice-based research, and the integration of performance and ethnographic research as creative praxis and ethics, this dialogue has yielded important insights into the nature of music and social life. Ethnomusicologists have made significant contributions to the wider interdisciplinary discourse here, including focused studies of music and sound, advances in performative ethnography, and theories of intersubjectivity and embodiment. As ethnomusicologists become increasingly invested in issues of social justice, what I have termed the “utopian” dimensions of some strands of performance studies and CIS offer compelling entry points for research and coalition work with marginalized communities and for inquiry into under-explored areas, such as disability and the gender and sexuality spectra. We need to look hopefully at the horizon of possibilities and keep a sharp critical eye open for fissures and fractures in our analyses. There is also much scope for the use of theory from performance studies and CIS in ethnographies of musical institutions, such as festivals and community, religious, and educational organizations. Here, I think of the way that situated practices within institutional frameworks might articulate with the performative and improvisatory functions of those very institutions, as they draw and redraw boundaries of exclusion. What might these bodies of theory have to offer to the project of decolonizing musical institutions? Ethnomusicologists certainly have much to contribute to CIS by applying theories from that field to a more diverse range of musical and sonic contexts than has hitherto been the case. And because many, perhaps most, ethnomusicologists are also dedicated musicians, the further development of practice-based research is a natural extension of theory—a complement, not a corrective. Finally, working out from the position that situated practices are always social practices, we might consider ways in which they are also environmental practices. One of the most exciting areas of inquiry here is the articulation of ecological theories (e.g. Ingold 2007; Haraway 2016; Morton 2016, 2018) with performance studies and CIS. What would the analysis of the entanglement of human and more-than-human factors within a given musical ecosystem tell us about the roles that music can play in helping us to live in “response-ability” on a damaged planet (Haraway 2016: 2)?36 Taking up these challenges, ethnomusicologists will continue to be leaders in performance studies and CIS of music and sound.

Notes 1 The themes of embodiment and social practice are critical to a wide range of currents in contemporary social thought. On embodiment, see Text Box 1.1. On social practice and practice theory, see Text Box 2.1. 2 Contemporary readings of Goffman vary. Like Waterman, many scholars see a substantial difference between, on the one hand, Goffman’s notion of the performance of the self and, on the other, work on the performative nature of the subject in the tradition of Judith Butler (1990, 1993); such scholars often read Butlerian performativity as an advance over the older approach. However, other scholars, like Philip Auslander (2003: 19, n11), have argued that there are important continuities between these perspectives, and Goffman’s work remains foundational for much of the sociological research on faceto-face social interaction. —Harris M. Berger

164  Ellen Waterman 3 The move from (objective, descriptive) ethnographies of musical performance to (reflexive, interpretive, and sometimes activist) performative ethnography is one consequence of this shift in our understanding of embodied and experiential knowledge that I discuss below. See Qureshi (1987) for a fine-grained empirical model for analyzing musical performance. On Qureshi, see also Manuel (this volume). 4 UCHRI was organized by George E. Lewis, Adriene Jenik, and Susan Leigh Foster at the University of California, Irvine. An important precursor to UCHRI was a 1999 conference named “Improvising Across Borders: An Inter-Disciplinary Symposium on Improvised Music Traditions,” which was organized by Dana Reason, Michael Dessen, and Jason Robinson at the University of California, San Diego (Lewis and Piekut 2016b: xi-xiii). ICASP was centered at the University of Guelph, but its organizers worked closely with partners at McGill University and the University of British Columbia. IICSI continues to be centered at the University of Guelph. 5 Ethnomusicologists have always written about performance, and performing music is integral to music studies in the North American academy; however, the performative turn has taken some time to seep through music studies as a whole. Recent work in the UK, centered at the Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice at the University of Cambridge, has inaugurated a new wave of musical performance studies across the various music sub-disciplines. To date, this research has more often focused on detailed empirical studies of how musical performance operates (i.e. on players and listeners) than on its social or cultural effects. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill, however, make direct connections to the discipline of performance studies in their edited volume Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance (2013), which also includes contributions from across music studies, including ethnomusicology (e.g. the chapters by David Borgo and Ingrid Monson). As the editors observe, “the wonder is not that music and performance studies come together in this book, but that they ever needed to be brought together” (2). 6 I am indebted to Harris Berger, himself inspired by Richard Bauman ([1977] 1984), for his careful articulation of this set of precursors to performance studies. For excellent introductions to performance studies, see Carlson ([1996] 2017), Schechner (2003), and Hamera and Madison (2006). 7 Austin’s work was central for a movement within analytic philosophy called “ordinary language philosophy,” which seeks to understand how language operates in social life. On ordinary language philosophy and the broader transdisciplinary trends that connect it with performance studies, see Text Box 1.2. 8 In the introduction to their edited volume Performativity and Performance, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995a) productively queer this example to show that performative language is far more complex than Austin’s formulation suggests. For example, they show how witnesses (the audience) are interpellated into the ritual: It is the constitution of a community of witness that makes the marriage; the silence of witness (we don’t speak now, we forever hold our peace) that permits it; the bare, negative, potent but undiscretionary speech act of our physical presence—maybe even especially the presence of people whom the institution of marriage defines itself by excluding—that ratifies and recruits the legitimacy of its privilege. (10–11) 9 Harris M. Berger (1997) takes up the idea of multi-functionality in work on time perception in heavy metal drumming. Building on Jakobson’s idea as well as those of Edmund Husserl ([1929] 1964), Berger suggests that time perception is a kind of social practice and that different modes of temporal perception serve differing purposes for the participants in a performance event. (See also Berger’s chapter on phenomenology in ethnomusicology in this volume.) 10 On the significance of Bateson’s notion of framing for linguistics and semiotic, see Beaster-Jones (this volume). 11 Turner taught at a number of institutions in the US. The Department of Performance Studies was considerably developed under the leadership of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who was chair from 1981 to 1992. 12 Colin Turnbull similarly identifies liminality “as the process of transformation at work” in the rituals of the Mbuti forest people in Central Africa ([1961] 1990: 79). 13 See also Waterman (1998a, 1998b, 1998c). 14 On Schafer’s role in sound studies, see Meizel and Daughtry (this volume). 15 The relationship between theory and data in social research has been a central concern to a wide range of scholars. On the dialectic of theory and data in ethnographic work, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume).

Performance and Improvisation  165 16 On Geertz and ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume). On Geertz, interpretive anthropology, and gender, see Sugarman (this volume). 17 On participant-observation in ethnomusicology, see Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume). 18 Related to Wong’s work is Nina Eidsheim’s notion of “performative listening” (2009). See Meizel and Daughtry (this volume) for a discussion of Eidsheim. 19 For a further discussion of Muñoz, see Sugarman (this volume). 20 Sound studies scholars share this concern for exploring new media in ethnographic representation. See Meizel and Daughtry (this volume). 21 For a fuller discussion of Said, see Wallach and Clinton (this volume). 22 The terms “Critical Improvisation Studies” and “Critical Studies in Improvisation” have both been widely used and are synonymous. In this chapter, I use the succinct designation CIS to refer to the field. 23 Begun in the late 1950s and 1960s, free jazz abandoned the conventions of harmony and form previously dominant in the genre in favor of an open approach to improvisation. The term is closely associated with saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s 1961 double quartet album Free Jazz. The expression “free improvisation” was used by UK and continental European improvisers in the 1960s to refer to a non-idiomatic form of improvisation that determinedly avoided referencing previous styles or genres. An oft-cited source of information about free improvisation is guitarist Derek Bailey’s book Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music ([1980] 1993). Bailey claims that improvisation is the “most widely practiced” and “least acknowledged and understood of musical practices” (ix). This tension between claims made for specific forms of improvisation and claims about improvisation’s pervasiveness is characteristic of the early development of CIS. 24 A game piece is essentially a framework for improvisation in which players make musical choices according to a given set of rules that are often signaled by a conductor using hand gestures, cards, and hats. For example, Zorn has created musical game pieces by adapting the rules of sports such as hockey and lacrosse. Cobra is arguably his most famous and oft-performed game piece. 25 The Improvisation Studies Reader, edited by Rebecca Caines and Heble (2015), and the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, edited by Lewis and Piekut (2016a), offer a wide variety of perspectives for the reader who wishes to delve deeply into CIS. See also the open-source, peer-reviewed journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation. 26 A discussion of all of the ethnomusicological research on improvised music is beyond the scope of this short section, which focuses exclusively on the field of CIS. With the exception of the pioneering work of Ernst Ferand (1938), the serious study of improvisation per se in ethnomusicology came in the 1970s, relatively late in the field’s development (Nettl 2016). In addition to his own important studies of improvisation in the classical Persian genre radif (1972; [1987] 1992), Bruno Nettl has spearheaded two landmark collections on improvisation across diverse cultures and genres, In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation (Nettl and Russell 1998) and Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society (Solis and Nettl 2009). See also Bakan et al (2008), Berliner (1994), Farhat (1990), Feld (2012), Jairazbhoy (1971), Kaufmann (1968, 1976), Marcus (2007), Nzewi (1991), Muller and Benjamin (2011), Nooshin (2003, 2015), Racy (2000), Shannon (2006), Touma (1971), and Wade (1984). Since 2010, scholarship on improvisation in ethnomusicology has been greatly energized by the leadership of young scholars, including Mark Laver (2015), Siv Lie (2017), Mark Lomanno (2012), and Alex Rodriguez (2016), as well as seasoned jazz scholar Scott Currie (2017), who were all instrumental in founding the Improvisation Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology (see Improvisation and Ethnomusicology, n.d.). I am indebted to Mark Laver, who did much work to assemble a summary of research on this topic for the Improvisation Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. See Nettl (2016) for an excellent overview of the ethnomusicological study of improvisation.   It is worth noting as well that space has only allowed me to discuss a small selection of the substantial CIS scholarship on music. For example, an important body of writings in this area exists in French and German (see Lewis and Piekut, 2016b). Scholars within CIS have likewise engaged the topic of music pedagogy. Relevant works include, Heble and Laver (2016), Heble et al (2011), and a special issue of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation edited by Heble and Waterman (2007). Finally, I will note that the world of jazz studies is vast, and the only scholars I have addressed in this area are those from within CIS (e.g. G. Lewis, E. Lewis, Heble, Monson, Stanyek, and Tucker). A significant ethnomusicological study on this topic is Paul Berliner’s magisterial Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (1994). 27 For a novel extension of the idea of “the performative,” see McMullen’s (2016) essay on “the improvisative.” 28 Deep Listening is a philosophy and practice of active global and focal listening developed by Oliveros over many decades. For more information on her work, see the Deep Listening Institute website (Deep Listening n.d.).

166  Ellen Waterman 29 See AUMI-KU InterArts (n.d.). Tucker has also collaborated with Jesse Stewart, a percussionist, improviser, and composer, who has run similar projects with AUMI in Ottawa, Canada (Stewart et al 2017). 30 This notion is related to what scholars often refer to as “homology theory,” which suggests that a group’s social structure is parallel with or analogous to the musical structures that it employs. See Manuel (this volume, n10). —Harris M. Berger 31 Although Attali doesn’t discuss punk music and DIY (Do It Yourself ) culture, he was, of course, writing during the birth of these movements, which are another key example of musical and social rebellion. Although his theory is both ideological and extremely general, his analysis is at least partly prescient, considering the radical reconfiguration of the recording industry that came later and the advent of Internet music publishing. 32 Here, they are in company with African American literary and cultural theorists of performance, such as bell hooks (1995), Robin D. G. Kelley (2002), and Fred Moten (2003). 33 As George Lewis points out, important writings on improvisation and the social have emerged from AACM members (e.g. Braxton 1985; Smith 1974). 34 For an account of the AACM’s international impact, see E. Lewis (2017); for a discussion of Afro-­futurism and radical gender politics in Nicole Mitchell’s music, see McNeilly and Smith (2016). 35 Born’s theory of musical assemblages draws in part on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri’s theory of assemblages (1980), which geographer Martin Müller has succinctly described as “a mode of ordering heterogeneous entities so that they work together for a certain time” (2015: 28). 36 See Sugarman (this volume) for a related discussion of ways that ethnomusicology might develop through engagements with ecological scholarship and other bodies of theory that seek to rethink the notion of the human.

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172  Ellen Waterman Marcus, Scott Lloyd. 2007. Music in Egypt: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, Keavy, and Dylan Robinson, eds. 2016. Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press. McKendrick, Karmen. 1999. Counterpleasures. Albany: State University of New York Press. McLeod, Norma, and Marcia Herndon. 1980. The Ethnography of Musical Performance. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions. Morton, Timothy. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2018. Being Ecological. London: Pelican. McMullen, Tracy. 2016. “The Improvisative.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, Vol. 2, 115–27. New York: Oxford University Press. McNeilly, Kevin, and Julie Dawn Smith. 2016. “Extemporaneous Genomics: Nicole Mitchell, Octavia Butler, and Xenogenesis.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, 245–64. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mitchell, Nicole. 2008. Xenogenesis Suite: Tribute to Octavia Butler. Black Earth Ensemble. Firehouse 12 Records. Monson, Ingrid. 1996. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2007. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muller, Carol Ann, and Sathima Bea Benjamin. 2011. Musical Echoes: South African Women Thinking in Jazz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Müller, Martin. 2015. “Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material Power, Politics, and Space.” Geography Compass 9 (1): 27–41. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nettl, Bruno. 1972. Daramad of Chahargah: A Study in the Performance Practice of Persian Music. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press. ———. (1987) 1992. The Radif of Persian Music: Studies of Structure and Cultural Context. Champaign, IL: Elephant & Cat. ———. 2016. “Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation: Perspectives from Ethnomusicology.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, edited by George E. Lewis and Benjamin Piekut, Vol. 2, 169–84. New York: Oxford University Press. Nettl, Bruno, with Melinda Russell. 1998. In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nicholls, Tracey. 2012. An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future. Plymouth: ­L exington Books. Njaradi, Dunja. 2013. “Performance Ethnography: Theatre and Anthropology through the New Study of Ritual.” In Performance Ethnography: Dance, Drama, Music edited by Peter Harrop and Dunja Njaradi, 23–44. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Nooshin, Laudan. 2003. “Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge, and Power; The Case of ­Iranian Classical Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128 (2): 242–96. ———. 2015. Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity. Surrey: Ashgate. Nzewi, Meki. 1991. Musical Practice and Creativity: An African Traditional Perspective. Bayreuth: ­IwalewaHaus, University of Bayreuth. Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Practice. Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Institute. ———. 2010. Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009. Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Institute. ———. 2016. “Improvising Composition: How to Listen in the Time Between.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, 75–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oliveros, Pauline, Leaf Miller, Jaclyn Heyen, Gillian Siddall, and Sergio Hazard. 2011. “A Musical Improvisation Interface for People with Severe Physical Disabilities.” Music and Medicine 3 (3): 172–81.

Performance and Improvisation  173 Paredes, Américo. (1958) 1970. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press. Paredes, Américo, and Richard Bauman. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Trickster Press. Parker, Andrew, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 1995a. “Introduction: Performativity and Performance.” In Performativity and Performance, edited by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–18. New York: Routledge. ———. 1995b. Performativity and Performance. London: Routledge. Peters, Gary. 2009. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Qureshi, Regula. 1987. “Musical Sound and Contextual Input: A Performance Model for Musical Analysis.” Ethnomusicology 31 (4): 56–86. Racy, Ali Jihad. 2000. “The Many Faces of Improvisation: The Arab Taqasim as a Musical Symbol.” Ethnomusicology 44 (2): 302–20. Ramshaw, Sara. 2013. Justice as Improvisation: The Law of the Extempore. New York: Routledge. Ramshaw, Sara, Adnan Marquez-Borbon, Seamus Mulholland, and Paul Stapleton. 2017. “Hydra: A ­Creative Training Tool for Critical Legal Advocacy and Ethics.” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 12 (1). http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/3751. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 1997. Auto/ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. New York: Berg. Robinson, Dylan. 2017. “Enchantment’s Irreconcilable Connection: Listening to Anger, Being Idle No More.” In Performance Studies in Canada, edited by Laura Levin and Marlis Schweitzer, 211–35. ­McGill-Queen’s University Press. Rodriguez, Alex W. 2016. “Harmolodic Pedagogy and the Challenge of Omni-Musicality.” Jazz Perspectives 9 (2): 173–192. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Sawyer, Keith. 2003. Improvised Dialogues: Emergence and Creativity in Conversation. Westport, CT: Ablex. ———. 2011. Structure and Improvisation in Creative Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schafer, R. Murray. 1991. Patria and the Theatre of Confluence. Indian River, ON: Arcana Editions. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theater and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2003. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suyá Sing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shannon, Jonathan Holt. 2006. Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria. ­M iddletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Sherzer, Joel. 1982. “Poetic Structuring of Kuna Discourse: The Line.” Language in Society 11 (3): 371–90. Siddall, Gillian. 2016. “The Erotics of Improvisation in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, 201–16. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silverstein, Shayna. 2016. “The Punk Arab: Demystifying Omar Souleyman’s Techno-Dabke.” In Punk Ethnography: Artists and Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies, edited by Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim, 265–88. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Singer, Milton, ed. 1959. Traditional India: Structure and Change. Philadelphia, PA: American Folklore Society. Smith, Julie Dawn, and Ellen Waterman. 2013. “The Listening Trust: The Everyday Politics of George Lewis’s ‘Dream Team.’” In People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz Is Now!, edited by Ajay Heble and Rob Wallace, 59–87. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Wadada Leo. 1974. “(M1) American Music.” Black Perspectives in Music 2 (2): 111–16. Solis, Gabriel, and Bruno Nettl. 2009. Musical Improvisation: Art, Education, and Society. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Solis, Ted, ed. 2004. Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spiller, Henry. 2010. Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2014. “Interdisciplinarity and Musical Exceptionalism.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 341–46.

174  Ellen Waterman Stanyek, Jason. 2004. “Transmissions of an Interculture: Pan-African Jazz and Intercultural Improvisation.” In The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, 87–130. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2011. “‘A Thread that Connects the Worlds’: Ovoid Logics and the Contradictory Lines of Force of Brazilian Improvisations.” Critical Studies in Improvisation 7 (1). https://www.criticalimprov.com/ index.php/csieci/article/view/1489/2066. Stewart, Jesse, Sherrie Tucker, Peter A. Williams, and Kip Haaheim. 2017. “Aumi-Futurism: The Elsewhere and ‘Elsewhen’ of (Un)Rolling the Boulder and Turning the Page,” Music and Arts in Action (MAIA) 6 (1). http://musicandartsinaction.net/index.php/maia/article/view/140/pdf. Stone, Ruth M. (1982) 2010. Let the Inside Be Sweet: The Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of Liberia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Trickster Press. ———. 1988. Dried Millet Breaking: Time, Words, and Song in the Woi Epic of the Kpelle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. (2003) 2007. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tedlock, Dennis. (1972) 1999. Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press. Touma, Habib Hassan. 1971. “The Maqam Phenomenon: An Improvisation Technique in the Music of the Middle East.” Ethnomusicology 15 (1): 38–48. Tucker, Sherrie. 2000. Swing Shift: All Girl Bands of the 1940s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tucker, Sherrie, Pauline Oliveros, Neil Rolnick, Christine Sun Kim, Clara Tomaz, David Whalen, Leaf Miller, and Jaclyn Heyen. 2016. “Stretched Boundaries: Improvising across Abilities.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, 181–200. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Turnbull, Colin. (1961) 1990. “Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience.” In By Means of Performance, edited by Richard Schechner and Willa Appel, 50–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, Victor. 1964. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Symposium on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 4–20. Seattle: American Ethnological Society. ———. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. ———. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. ———. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. van Gennep, Arnold. (1908) 1960. The Rites of Passage, translated by M.B. Vizedon and G.L. Caffee. ­Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wade, Bonnie. 1984. Khyāl: Creativity within North India’s Classical Music Tradition. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Wallace, Rob. 2012. Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism. New York: Bloomsbury. Waterman, Ellen. 1997. “Documentation and Analysis of R. Murray Schafer’s Patria the Epilogue: And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon.” PhD Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. ———. 1998a. “Confluence and Collaboration Part Two: Performing R. Murray Schafer’s And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon.” Musicworks 72: 16–24. ———. 1998b. “R. Murray Schafer’s And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon: The Nexus of Ideal and Real ­Wilderness.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’ètudes Canadiennes 16: 139–151.

Performance and Improvisation  175 ———. 1998c. “Wolf Music: Style, Context, and Authenticity in R. Murray Schafer’s And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon.” Canadian University Music Review 18 (2): 72–88. ———. 2001. “Patria at the Millennium”. Topia: A Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 6: 21–44. ———. 2009. “Naked Intimacy: Eroticism, Improvisation, and Gender.” Critical Studies in Improvisation/ Études critiques en improvisation. 4 (2). http://dx.doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v4i2.845. ———. 2016. “Improvisation and the Audibility of Difference: Safa, Canadian Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Recognition.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, 283–306. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weick, Karl E. 1998. “Improvisation as a Mindset for Organizational Analysis.” Organization Science 9 (5): 543–55. Wong, Deborah. 2004. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music. New York: Routledge. ———. 2008. “Moving from Performance to Performative Ethnography and Back Again.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 2nd ed., edited by Gregory Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 76–89. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. “Faster and Louder: Heterosexist Improvisation in North American Taiko.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman, 265–82. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2017. “Deadly Soundscapes: Scripts of Lethal Force and Lo-Fi Death.” In Theorizing Sound Writing, edited by Deborah Kapchan, 253–76. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2019. Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko. Berkeley: University of California Press.

7 Decentering Music Sound Studies and Voice Studies in Ethnomusicology Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry

Ethnomusicologists have been concerned with the broad category of voice and the even more capacious category of sound since the early days of the discipline. To take a ­single example, Alan Merriam (e.g. 1962, 1977) regularly acknowledged the insufficiency of the terms “singing” or “music” when applied to fieldsites where vocal practices moved smoothly along a spectrum from everyday speech to melodious chanting, and where material objects that looked and sounded to his ear like musical instruments were used for non-musical ­purposes by sonic actors who themselves were often attuned to nonhuman soundscapes (e.g. “ocarinas” used as “signalling device[s]” by hunters situated within the animal and environmental sounds of the hunt). In other words, ethnomusicology has long recognized the ways in which sound and voice trouble narrow understandings of music, serving ­simultaneously as the ontological foundation and the taxonomic excess of ­musical praxis. More recently, and with increasing frequency, ethnomusicologists have begun undertaking ­serious, sustained investigations that refuse to privilege the musical over the non-musical (e.g. Feld [1982] 2012; Fox 2004; Ochoa Gautier 2014; Wong 2017) and that actively participate in broader interdisciplinary conversations about the cultural histories, social dynamics, and corporeal effects of vocal expressions and audible vibrations (e.g. S­ eeger 1987; Weidman 2006; Meizel 2011; Schwartz 2015). In no small measure, we argue, contemporary e­ thnomusicology can be characterized by its tendency to decenter music in favor of the more expansive terrains of sound and voice. Teasing out the relations among these three interdigitated concepts, one can say that ­anything experienced as “music” involves sound—or, at the very least, is assigned a r­elationship to sound. However, precisely which sounds are interpreted as music depends on interpretive frameworks that have both cultural and individual dimensions. Indeed, it would not be an empty tautology to say that “music” is best defined as “that which is listened to as music,” so long as “listening” is understood to be not the passive reception of sounds by the ear but a historically and culturally inflected act of individuals and collectives. Deborah Wong (2014) has argued that focusing on sound rather than on the narrower notion of music can help ethnomusicologists avoid the bias, stemming from the Western conservatory, that frames music as a sphere of aesthetic experience separated from the rest of social life. Adopting the framework of sound effectively provincializes music, revealing it to be but one neighborhood in a larger conceptual territory of vibration, resonance, mediation, and audition. David ­Novak and Matt Sakakeeny have assessed the costs and benefits of this move, cautioning that “the repositioning of ‘music’ within the domain of ‘sound,’” while generally clarifying, “has sometimes minimized or obscured the vastly different histories of these terminological concepts” (2015: 6). The relationship between “sound” and “music,” they argue, is a complicated one, with each term bringing its own history of use, its own cluster of connotations, and its own network of analogues in translation.

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What then of “music” and “voice?” It would seem that the latter term, rather than s­ wallowing up the former as sound purports to do, cuts through it, establishing a vector that emphasizes music’s embodied and communicative capacities. To focus on voice is to place singing in dialogue, as it were, with the full range of vocal practices, from the cough to the whisper to the scream (LaBelle 2014). This move encourages music scholars to explore a broad range of vocal performances, including those (e.g. Qur’anic recitation) that are understood by practitioners to exist outside of musical frameworks. At the same time, ­emphasis on voice in music necessarily comes at the expense of drawing attention away from its non-vocal dimensions. Instead of provincializing music, then, the frame of voice filters it, revealing the intensity of its ties to other modes of vocal utterance. Voice is at once broader and narrower than music, rendering the relationship between the two terms interestingly unstable. What follows is a selective review of ethnomusicology’s discursive encounters with sound studies and voice studies, burgeoning interdisciplines that join together scholars throughout the humanities, social sciences, and, increasingly, sciences in pursuit of a deeper understanding of their respective objects. In the first half of this chapter, we survey ethnographic and environmental approaches to the study of sound, sound-centric studies of media and technology, and recent explorations of the relationship between sound and listening. The second half assesses scholarship on voice in clinical and philosophical registers, explores vocal embodiment and the perception of social and physiological difference,1 and examines the politics of collective vocality and the use of voice as a metaphor for authorial agency. Each half concludes with a brief case study drawn from our engagement with the rubrics of sound (Daughtry) and voice (Meizel). The chapter closes with a brief set of remarks on the implications that sound studies and voice studies hold for ethnomusicology, and vice versa.

Sound Studies: From Acoustemology to Precarity “Sound Studies,” writes Jonathan Sterne, “is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival” (2012a: 2, emphasis in the original). Scholars who identify with sound studies enjoy a wide range of interests, from acoustics to perception, from sound media to intersensoriality, from histories of listening to critiques of sonic violence. Sound studies scholars grapple with the complex dynamics of sonic acts and the equally complex interrelationships that bind sounds, humans, and environments together. Though the study of sound has a centuries-long history, sound studies only began to coalesce as a coherent field of inquiry in the early 2000s, with the publication of influential monographs and edited volumes by Bruce Smith (1999), John Durham Peters (1999), Emily Thompson (2002), Jonathan Sterne (2003), Veit ­Erlmann (2004), Michael Bull and Les Back (2003), Mark Smith (2004), and others. With time, scholarly societies began to reflect their memberships’ growing interest in sound: the ­A merican Anthropological Association formed a Music and Sound Interest Group in 2009, the same year that the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) established its Sound Studies Special Interest Group. The conference theme of the 2010 SEM conference was “Sound Ecologies,” and its call for proposals encouraged “a keen interest in environments and soundscapes” (Society for Ethnomusicology 2010). The American Studies Association launched its Sound Studies Caucus in 2011, and in 2012 SEM and the American Musicological Society held a joint pre-conference symposium on ecomusicology that reflected a widespread engagement with sonic phenomena. That same year saw the publication of the Sound Studies Reader, which was edited by Sterne, and The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ­edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, followed in 2012. The past decade has also witnessed the establishment of academic journals in this area: The Journal of Sonic

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Studies; Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound ­Experience are peer-reviewed vehicles, and the popular blog Sounding Out!, founded in 2009, remains a vibrant site for informal sound-centered scholarship. Sound Ethnography, Soundscapes, and Ecomusicology The principal contributions that ethnomusicologists have made to the interdisciplinary conversation on sound involve a sensitivity to the dynamics of musical praxis, a commitment to ethnographic methodologies, and attention to subjects outside of the Anglophone West. Steven Feld’s landmark monograph Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (first published in 1982 and with revised editions in 1990 and 2012) exemplifies all three of these characteristics.2 Sound and Sentiment has been widely acknowledged as a foundational text for sound studies, one that laid out many of the priorities for the field that would emerge two decades later.3 Feld has stated that his interest in the ethnography of sound came from his undergraduate work in the late 1960s with the anthropologist Colin Turnbull (1924–1999). “It was in the process of thinking about the relationship between his [Turnbull’s] recordings and his writings,” Feld explains, “that I realized how important sound and sound recording was, particularly if you did research with people who live in intensely rich aural environments” (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 461). Feld’s research among the Kaluli people in Papua New Guinea’s Bosavi rainforest detailed how they connected human expression with the sounds of birds, and how bird sounds helped to shape Kaluli experience. His interest in the Kaluli’s sound-saturated mode of being-in-the-world led him to coin the term acoustemology in the 1990s.4 Combining “acoustics” and “epistemology,” this portmanteau reveals sound to be more than a simple by-product of nature and/or culture; sound, for Feld, also encompasses the dynamic feedback that joins acts of sounding to acts of listening, interpretation, and emplacement. In his most recent formulation of the concept, Feld writes: Acoustemology … question[s] sound as a way of knowing. It asks what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening. Acoustemology begins with acoustics to ask how the dynamism of sound’s physical energy indexes its social immediacy. It asks how the physicality of sound is so instantly and forcefully present to experience and experiencers, to interpreters and interpretations. Answers to such questions do not specifically engage acoustics on the formal scientific plane that investigates the physical components of sound’s materiality … Rather, acoustemology engages acoustics at the plane of the audible—akoustos—to inquire into sounding as simultaneously social and material, an experiential nexus of sonic sensation. (2017: 85) An acoustemological approach to the study of sound provides “a new all-species way to talk about the emplaced copresence and correlations of multiple sounds and sources” ([1982] 2012, xxvii) and about the ways in which sound and listening participate in the constitution of experiential worlds. This move has helped subsequent scholars effect a turn away from deterministic histories of sound media 5 and toward the project of understanding the structures, flows, and disjunctures of what Deborah Kapchan (2017: 2) has called “sound ­k nowledge—a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening.” One of the distinctive features that sound studies and ethnomusicology share is a sustained discourse on the value of recorded sound as a mode of scholarship in its own right, rather than as an illustration or adjunct to the authoritative word.6 In ­ethnomusicology, the best-known piece of “sound scholarship” is Feld’s Voices of the Rainforest, a series of extended

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environmental recordings of Kaluli life that aired on (US) National Public Radio in 1984 and 1985, and was later released on compact disc (1991). Other influential works include Barry Truax’s environmental compositions from the same period (e.g. Riverrun and other tracks on Digital Soundscapes [1986])7 and Hildegard Westerkamp’s “soundwalks” and “composed environments” (see Westerkamp n.d., 2002). More recently, sound artists such as Francisco López (1998) and Christina Kubisch have created works that subtly map the vibrational environment of particular spaces and emphasize the sonic agency of human and nonhuman entities, from frogs to thunder to the thrumming of machines. Kubisch’s “Electrical Walks” series (see Kubisch, n.d.) is particularly provocative in that she uses specially designed headphones to allow participants to hear the otherwise inaudible field of electromagnetic vibrations that are generated by the ubiquitous technologies of modernity (e.g. light fixtures, ATM machines, computers, electric outlets). Sound works such as these do much more than entertain: they generate questions, crystallize fields of inquiry, and illuminate relationships between sounds, listeners, and the environments they inhabit. All of these projects owe some debt to the work of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (b. 1933), who introduced the notion of soundscape to mean “any acoustic field of study” (such as a composition, a radio program, or an acoustic environment) that allows one to understand the sonic dimensions of a region or locale (1969, 1977, 1994). In 1969, Schafer and his colleagues in the World Soundscape Project began recording a wide variety of environmental sounds, which, in turn, led to the development of the field of acoustic ecology. The term “soundscape” itself has multiple meanings. “Like landscape,” as ethnomusicologist David Samuels and his co-authors put it, soundscape “contains the contradictory forces of the natural and the cultural, the fortuitous and the composed, the improvised and the deliberately produced. Similarly, as landscape is constituted by cultural histories, ideologies, and ­ eintjes, practices of seeing, soundscape implicates listening as a cultural practice” (Samuels, M Ochoa, and Porcello 2010: 330).8 In this sense, the “-scape” of landscape and soundscape points both to the capture of an environmental scene and to the transformation of that scene through its framing. In another sense, the -scape suffix implies fluidity and flow, such as the ­ ppadurai, movement of people, ideas, and capital that, according to anthropologist Arjun A characterizes the process of globalization (1990, 1996). Here, “soundscape” can be heard to join ­Appadurai’s terms “ethnoscape,” “mediascape,” “technoscape,” “­ financescape,” and “ideoscape,” adding a sensory, interspecies dimension to these otherwise synthetic and ­human-centered concepts. (On Appadurai’s theory of “-scapes,” see Wallach and Clinton [this volume]. On Schafer and performance studies, see Waterman [this volume].) The notion of the soundscape is a complex one that continues to evolve. In my (Daughtry’s) 2015 study of wartime sounds and audition, I critique the soundscape concept, pointing to the paradoxical way in which its seeming inclusivity (i.e. soundscapes appear to involve all of the sounds in a particular locale) is actually the product of a discrete act of audition by a discrete  ­auditor (i.e. what I record, what is audible to me). All too often, this auditor goes unmentioned and untheorized, as do the ideologies of sounding, listening, and emplacement that necessarily undergird all soundscapes. With this in mind, it can be productive to think of soundscapes as the products of three forces: auditory regimes (i.e. the habitus that structures the act of listening in a given place),9 sonic campaigns (the structures and agendas that enable particular sonic acts), and acoustic territories (the environments that help shape and are themselves shaped by acts of sounding). These forces, in turn, need to be understood as interacting in complex ways with the similarly dynamic forces that are linked to other sensory modalities. As I have argued: To imagine human experience taking place at the intersection of auditory regimes, sonic campaigns, and acoustic territories is to confront the immensely complicated web of histories, actors, and influences that hides beneath the seemingly simple act of

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listening to the sounds that surround us. But the situation is significantly more complex than that. In the end, in order to move closer to an appreciation of the rich complexity of human sensory experience, we would have to imagine these three frameworks interacting in unpredictable ways with the scopic, tactile, olfactory, and other sensory regimes, campaigns and territories that are in a constant state of efflorescence around each one of us. We would have to make room for intersensorial hybridity, the merging of regimes of sight and smell and hearing and touch and thermoception and proprioception and the so-called “sixth sense” (see Howes 2009). And, to make matters even more confounding, we would have to acknowledge the myriad iconoclastic acts of listening, sounding, looking, moving, emitting, smelling, and in other ways interacting with the world that take place every day. The mind reels at the prospect of coming to terms with our essential experiential richness and constant state of sensory excess. (2015: 212) Musical sound adds still more complexity to this situation. Although music is only one part of a locale’s soundscape, attending closely to musical praxis can deepen our understanding of ­ attiez the profound role that environmental sounds play in human lifeways. As Jean-Jacques N (1999), Ted Levin (2006), and Megan Rancier (2014) have suggested, many indigenous musical traditions can be heard as archives of locally emplaced sounds, such as the presence of a mosquito’s buzzing or the calls of seabirds in Inuit throat games, the mimetic reflection of water in some modes of Tuvan throat singing, or the imitation of wolves in the music of the Kazakh qyl-qobyz fiddle. Similarly, many of the sonic tropes of hip-hop beatboxers and the practice of sampling in hip-hop music production can be heard as mimetic translations of industrial soundscapes into human terms. As Daphne Carr (forthcoming) notes, the ubiquity within hip-hop of the police siren—either in the form of a recorded sample or as approximated by the voice (e.g. in the 1993 song “Sound of Da Police” by ­K RS-One: “Woop, Woop! That’s the sound of da police! Woop, Woop! That’s the sound of the beast!”)—­ powerfully evokes the dystopian urban soundscape of African American alterity and the complex of structural inequities and existential challenges that help to configure it. This type of soundscape research is closely related to the burgeoning area of ecomusicology, which began to develop in the first decade of the twenty-first century and, in ­ethnomusicology, coalesced with the founding in 2011 of the SEM’s Ecomusicology S­ pecial Interest Group. Scholars in this area seek to understand the “intellectual and practical ­connections between the studies of music, culture, and nature (both the socially constructed ‘nature’ [i.e., ideas and ideologies about the environment] and the physical environment)” (Ecomusicology: n.d.). Where older scholarship on music and the environment focused on representations of place in music, the new ecomusicology uses music and sound to understand the concrete links between a people’s social practices and the natural environments from which they emerge. This approach is crystallized in Nancy Guy’s call for attention to “environmental materiality, to the affective bonds [that connect the people in a locale] with nonhuman elements (sentient or otherwise), … [and] to the perception and experience of the physical environment” (2009: 219). Much of the work done in ecomusicology takes activism as its focus. For example, Mark Pedelty’s Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment (2012) and A Song to Save the Salish Sea: Musical Performance as Environmental Activism (2016) examine the role of ­music—in particular, popular musics—in environmentalist movements. A performer himself, ­Pedelty asks questions that are at the forefront of studies in sound and the environment: “How can we make our music more sustainable? Or, to put it in more positive terms, how might our music proactively promote sustainability? Can music be put to work?” (2012: 5).10 The idea of sustainability has inspired a variety of preservation and management projects. More

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than merely documenting soundscapes, these projects interpret the meaning of sound, place, and the relationship between the two. In 2000, for example, the US National Park Service founded the National Sounds Program (NSP). Their online archive presents recordings of sounds and soundscapes from a number of US national parks (National Sounds Program n.d.). Beyond merely collecting these sounds, the NSP also works to reduce the noise in US parklands, making these spaces correspond with the expectations of quiet and serenity that many urban dwellers have of rural spaces. Another example is historian Emily Thompson’s online archive of the everyday sounds heard in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s (Thompson and Mahoy n.d.). Many of the sounds in the archive were initially recorded by the city’s Noise Abatement Commission, which was established in 1929 to address a massive wave of noise complaints that had developed during the booming economy of jazz age New York. Digitizing these recordings, Thompson and her team preserve sounds from the past (e.g. street cries, church bells), but they also reinterpret their meanings, framing them as valuable historical texts, rather than environmental hazards. The project reminds us that the significance of sound is as fluid and contingent as the content of a soundscape itself. Discussing the literature in this area, Jeff Todd Titon has observed two prevalent types of ecomusicological work. The first type follows the model of ecocriticism in literature and focuses on musical texts, especially the representations of nature in music found within individual works by specific composers; the second type examines music’s impact on the environment and focuses on the issue of sustainability. Titon critiques ecomusicology’s failure to problematize the scientific-realist idea of nature as something externally “real and endangered,” rather than understanding it as a concept that is “humanly and socially constructed” (2013: 15). Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2016) has launched a more foundational critique, arguing that the vast bulk of the ecomusicological project ends up reinforcing untenable dividing lines that separate man (understood as “the transcendental autonomous individual,” Strathern 1988: 21, quoted in Ochoa Gautier 2016: 126), nature (understood as a fully separate reserve of nonhuman entities), and culture, specifically its musical/sounding element (understood as “the Good”; 126). Ochoa Gautier suggests that, rather than building their engagement upon ecomusicology’s tripartite model of essentialized relations among “nature, culture, and music,” sound scholars concerned with the environment need to “drastically rethink the political implications of keeping the underlying ontology that such a relation implies” (140). Sound Studies Approaches to Media and Technology If the ethnographic and ecocritical work discussed above can be seen to constitute ­promising peripheries for sound studies, investigations of the history of sound technologies (and the human “audile techniques” that enabled and were enabled by them; Sterne 2003) occupy a territory closer to its hot center. Since the late nineteenth century, audio recordings have served as a crucial site for the negotiation of human relationships to sound; over the twentieth century, people around the world integrated recordings into their situated praxes of listening to music, documenting events, memorializing the dead, imagining and reimagining the past, and managing the experience of time. Jonathan Sterne’s landmark 2003 monograph The Audible Past places the development of recording technologies into cultural context by situating them within the longer history of ideas about sound and perception in the West. The invention of sound recording was not merely a question of overcoming technical hurdles; rather, as Sterne writes, its emergence depended on cultural and economic relations “that [allowed] a set of technologies to stand out as a unified thing with clearly defined functions” (182).

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In the earliest years of mechanical sound inscription, those functions were not immediately defined. Until recently, credit for the creation of recorded sound was typically assigned to Thomas Edison. In 2008, however, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, along with a group from Indiana University, found that “transcriptions” made in the late 1850s and early 1860s by a device called a phonautograph—in which sound waves had been inscribed on sheets of paper and made visible using smoke from an everyday oil lamp—could be digitized and “played” with a newly created virtual stylus (Rosen 2008). The transcriptions had not been intended for playback but as an experiment in “stenography” (the visual representation of speech). These early accidental recordings were made by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a French typesetter, and predated Edison’s tinfoil phonograph by nearly twenty years. They are now considered the earliest extant recordings of the human voice. From this moment, and increasingly over time, recordings became a site of both the voice’s discursive location in the body and its dislocation from the body. As Miriama Young explains, the twentieth-century recording industry established a “paradigm in which the music, the performer, and its material manifestation [the recording] were inextricably bound” together (2016: 87); at the same time, Young argues, the new record labels commoditized and even fetishized acousmatic sound (sounds that come from unseen sources). In other words, in the context of this new music industry, the document provided by a recording functioned as both an index for a specific sound source—a piano, a body—and as a (mediated and mediating) source itself. Every successive iteration of recording technology—the phonograph, the 8-track, the ­ usic, cassette, the compact disc, the digital file—has changed the ways that people listen to m and these altered listening modes have, in turn, shaped the technologies that f­ollowed. Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format illuminates this recursive relationship between recorded sound and its listeners, encouraging researchers to “ask after the changing formations of media, the contexts of their reception, the conjunctures that shaped their sensual characteristics, and the institutional politics in which they were enmeshed” (2012b: 11). Tracing such processes, Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound argues that technologies do not ­d irectly change culture on their own; rather, it is the “relationship between the technology and its users that determines the [cultural] impact of recording” (2010: 3). For example, the development of digital music through the compact disc helped lead to the commercialization of hardware and software that made music portable and shareable in new ways; listeners, in turn, found more ways to move and share music, and further developments in digital formats improved this process. And just as scholars from traditional music fields have argued that active listening shapes our understanding of sound and music, sound studies scholars have shown that the mundane sounds that tend to be passively perceived in the background contribute to the shape of technology-user relationships. For example, Imar deVries and Isabella van Elferen have argued that the fragmentary music of cell-phone ringtones can operate as complex sensory and mnemonic triggers for aspects of everyday life (2010). Like Proust’s famous madeleine biscuit, which set off a flood of sensory memories for that author, the ringtone is associated with other sensory facets of music culture, along with personal, relational memories attached to the sound. Research devoted to mobile sound technologies such as cell phones and MP3 ­players ­examines the explosion of advancements in digital technology in the early twenty-first ­century and the corresponding advancement of sound into new spaces and places, including in ­cyberspace. As Jason Stanyek and Sumanth Gopinath argue in their introduction to The ­Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (2014), the history of mobile sound technologies is long and ­multi-tentacular, as the trope of mobility applies to millennia of portable musical instruments, musicians, and scores, as well as to the physics of sound itself. Stanyek and Gopinath also demonstrate how the contemporary history of mobile sound is deeply imbricated with

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technologies of surveillance and other sociotechnical realms that we don’t normally associate with music or audition. Sound studies work on technologies (e.g. Bijsterveld and van Dijck 2009; Sterne 2012b) reveals the robustness and plasticity of the networks of inventors, institutions, raw materials, labor pools, capital flows, and consumers that shape them.11 It is this plasticity that allows a mathematical technique used in oil exploration (autocorrelation) to work in the realm of pitch-correction (Auto-Tune) (Provenzano 2018). (On the role of mobile media technology in the globalization of music, see Wallach and Clinton [this volume].) Recent scholarship has also deepened our understanding of music and sound in other forms of digital media. Kiri Miller and William Cheng each address the embodied experiences of video game playing—listening, watching, acting, interacting—and the salience of sound as a constituent element of virtual space. Miller’s early work in this area (2009) investigated the schizophonic character of music games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in which players perform the gestures of live musicianship interactively with previously recorded sound. Her 2017 book Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media explores the multisensory nature of dance games, such as Just Dance or Dance Central, which “transform sonic material into visual and kinesthetic material, using processes that require the participation of dancing ­bodies” to generate “immersive multisensory experiences and intimate social connections” (95). Cheng’s 2014 Sound Play encourages readers to consider the place of video game sounds in experiences of agency, in ontologies of virtuality and reality, in game-world transgression, and violence. Game audio, he writes, “shuttles players between real and virtual registers of aural, visual, psychological, tactile, and aesthetic engagement” (13). This and other research in digital sound cultivate an interest in the “posthuman,” a complex concept that includes theories that extend subjectivity to nonhumans (e.g. Kohn 2013), studies of technologies that help humans transcend the limits of their fleshy bodies (e.g. Hayles 1999), and philosophical treatises on life after humanism (e.g. Wolfe 2009). Alexander Weheliye, for example, argued in 2002 for the study of subjectivity in sonic contexts, as most work on subjectivity to date had been ocularcentric (focused on the visual). In particular, he encouraged new attention to black uses of posthuman, technologically produced musical sounds, particularly in R&B, which he suggested are “not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity” (22). Modes of Listening One of the most energetic areas in sound studies involves an intense examination of listening experiences, proceeding either from the perspective of phenomenology (Ihde 1976; on phenomenology and ethnomusicology, see Berger, this volume) or from a more general interest in lived experience. If earlier music scholarship allowed listening to be subsumed into the more abstract concept of “reception,” a growing number of recent scholars—including Harris Berger (1999), Jean Luc Nancy (2007), Peter Szendy (2008), and Charles Hirschkind (2009)—theorize listening as not just the mode of apprehending music and sound, but as an ethical project, an act of poiesis, and even a mode of being-in-the-world. For example, film scholar Michel Chion has explored the differing ways in which audience members attend to sound and to the fusion of sound and image in film ([1994] 2012). Chion introduced the concepts of causal listening, “listening to a sound in order to gather information about its cause (or source),” semantic listening, “that which refers to a code or a language to interpret a message,” and reduced listening, which attends to the “sound object” and “focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning” (48–50; see also Fleeger 2014). Building on Chion’s work and that of anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2015), Kapchan argues that the process of listening is “transductive.” In electrical engineering, a transducer is a component that changes one form of energy into another form of energy. A microphone, for example, transduces the acoustical energy from sound waves into electrical energy, which

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is then sent to an amplifier or recorder. In her edited book Theorizing Sound Writing (2017), Kapchan suggests that listening operates in similar ways, as sounds perceived in the environment are transduced into other forms, such as thoughts, feelings, and actions. Recasting Chion’s scheme of listening practices as “genres of listening,” which she compares to genres of music, she argues that differing listening acts transduce sound in different ways, “orienting the listener in particular affective directions.” To Chion’s list of listening modes, Kapchan adds composer Pauline Oliveros’s notion of transformative “deep listening” (listening that initiates trance or other intense experiences; see Oliveros 2005), and Kapchan explains how the contributors to her book explore a wide range of listening processes, including “transitive and intransitive listening,” “empathic listening,” “layered [or “palimpsestic”] listening,” “tactical listening” (listening to effect change), and “listening as witness” (Kapchan 2017: 5).12 The act of listening, of course, is not strictly an affair of the ears. As music theorist Joseph Straus observes, even the auditory process of hearing itself can be considered a multisensory one, rather than a “one-to-one mapping of sense perceptions onto a single sensory organ [the ear]” (2011: 167). Beginning with Anthony Seeger’s Why Suyá Sing (1987), ethnomusicologists and, later, sound studies scholars have emphasized the extent to which the tactile, kinesthetic, and even visual systems register sound. The experience of attending a musical performance, for example, may include feeling vibrations, moving the body, and watching the actions of the musicians. Even listening to a recording involves more than hearing, and, as discussed above, recording technology itself initially came about through a desire for the visual representation of sound. As Sterne argues, the interaction between auditory and visual perception that has informed and often shaped sound recording and its listening practices creates a “kind of synesthesia” (2003: 50). Not usually referred to as an effect of sound recording, the term “synesthesia” is typically applied to a complex cognitive phenomenon, sometimes considered a neurological condition, in which two or more of an individual’s senses are involuntarily linked, as when a person sees a particular color when they hear a certain pitch or harmonic structure.13 Some studies (e.g. Neufeld et al. 2013) indicate that synesthesia may be more common in autistic people. Straus has considered autistic ways of hearing within a framework he calls “disablist hearing,” which rejects the ableist essentialization of hearing as a solely auditory/ cognitive process. For Straus, conventional music scholarship emphasizes “prodigious” and “normal” hearing; that is, it expects and constructs particular types of extraordinary and ordinary listeners to music, and in doing so, normalizes and reproduces these practices. Straus argues against framing other kinds of hearing as medical defects that must be cured or mitigated through music therapy. Rejecting medical models of disability, he supports the notion from disability studies that both ability and disability are socially constructed. In other words, if music education, performance, and production did not privilege “prodigious” or “normal” hearing, people who hear in other ways would not be considered “disabled.” Developing his argument, Straus identifies a variety of forms of hearing beyond the narrow confines of phonocentrism (the privileging of the experience of sound). Straus’s “autistic hearing,” for example, includes the modes of sensory processing and cognition experienced by people on the autism spectrum. Straus is careful to explain that not all autistic listeners experience what he describes, and that non-autistic listeners may also hear in this way. He writes: an autistic listener is someone who attends to the discrete musical event in all of its concrete detail (local coherence); who prefers the part to the whole; who is adept at creating associative networks (often involving private or idiosyncratic meanings); and who may have absolute pitch and a prodigious rote memory. (2011: 165)

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Along with Straus, media scholar Mara Mills (2015), d/Deaf artists such as percussionist Evelyn Glennie (e.g. Riedelsheimer 2004; Glennie 2015), and sound artist Christine Sun Kim (e.g. Kim 2015; Beete 2017) have amply demonstrated the vibrancy of d/Deaf modes of hearing, tracking a range of engagements with sound among populations once considered incapable of sensing it. “Deafness does not mean that you can’t hear,” Glennie writes, suggesting that the aural perception of sound is simply one “specialized form of touch” and that the vibrations she feels through her hands and feet and body are a way of hearing (2015). Kim likewise emphasizes that d/Deaf people are part of the world of sound, contributing to it and impacted by it regardless of their level of aural perception (Beete 2017). For Straus, the concept of “deaf hearing” underlines the importance of non-auditory senses in the act of listening, particularly the visual, the tactile, and the kinesthetic. In contrast, “blind hearing” is even more focused on the aural than normative hearing, and Straus argues that it highlights the widespread (though not universal) rejection of notation in music transmission and learning among blind musicians. Musical time and space, he notes, may work differently in non-normative perception, including mobility-inflected hearing, in which an individual’s experience of gait or the movement of a wheelchair may impact an internalized sense of flow and rupture (2011: 150–81). Further, Straus emphasizes that these categories of hearing cannot be applied to all individuals’ experiences of sound. For example, Deafness (as a cultural identity, which, in the literature, is glossed with a capital letter) and deafness (as an auditory condition, glossed with a lowercase letter) produce different backgrounds for hearing and encompass different levels or types of hearing, different ways of interacting with sound. Following in the footsteps of Straus’s work, ethnomusicologists have recently begun to engage with disability studies (e.g. Schwartz 2015; Bakan 2018; Meizel forthcoming), which is emerging as a major area of interest. The Sounds of Precarious Lives Ethnomusicology’s engagement with disability studies, along with much of the current scholarship we review in this chapter, reflects a growing attentiveness within the humanities to the existential condition of precariousness, in the broad sense given to this term by Judith Butler: “a common human vulnerability, one that emerges with life itself ” (2004: 31). Of course, all lives are precarious in the sense that they are interdependent and finite; however, some people are more vulnerable than others, as they struggle to contend with threatening economic, biopolitical, technological, and ecological forces that are unevenly distributed throughout the world. These forces, we observe, are often manifest in sound. Explicating timeless canonical works or placing non-Western peoples in an ethnographic present, traditional scholarship in musicology and ethnomusicology tended to neglect the presence of precarity in human experience, but contemporary music scholars have begun to address it directly (Rice 2014). From studies of music in the context of racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g. Crawley 2016; Orejuela and Shonekan 2018), to work on the politics of sound and music at the nexus of indigenous and colonial cultures (e.g. Karantonis and Robinson 2011; Robinson and Martin 2016), to important critiques of the racialized nature of the field of sound studies itself (Stadler 2015; Kheshti 2018), the subject of human fragility and finitude has emphatically moved into the foreground. Fragility and finitude are at the center of an emerging sound studies project from ethnomusicologist Denise Gill, which explores experiences of sound and listening in sacred spaces of death. In a 2017 essay, Gill examines the complex role sound plays in a Sunni Muslim corpse washing ritual in Turkey. The sound of the mourner’s laments, the prayers intoned by the female corpse washers, and the other sounds of the ritual practices create a localized, gendered soundscape at the threshold of life and death. She suggests that “[p]osthumous

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auralities—when translated and mediated linguistically—offer a sound path to understanding the continuations and transformations of sense experience that occur in death.” Gill puts this question to sound studies scholars: While we know that hearing remains the last of the senses experienced in dying, scholars of sound studies have yet to extend our exceptional inquiries on hearing, aurality, and listening into posthumous auralities practiced by multiple communities throughout the world. How might sound studies scholars attend to the multi-sensory perceptions and auralities that extend beyond the grey where western epistemological structures end? (2017)

A Case Study in Listening to the Sounds of War The epistemological structures to which Gill refers are routinely destabilized in environments where sound is implicated in projects of sustained violence. In recent years, sound’s capacity to psychologically traumatize (Cusick 2006, 2008; Goodman 2012; Friedson ­forthcoming) and physically wound (Taber et al. 2006; McKay 2013) has been the subject of increasing attention from scholars, journalists, and artists (e.g. Hamdan n.d.). My (Daughtry’s) work on the American-led war in Iraq (2003–2011) is a case in point. Conversations I had with Iraqi civilians and American military service members led to the contention that in wartime, sound is more than sound. This paradoxical formulation can be taken in two senses: first, for those who have learned to listen to and extract tactical information from wartime sounds, they are crucial tools in the enterprise of survival. This explains the extreme labors that wartime auditors put into the act of listening and the extreme virtuosity of many of their listening acts. Sound in wartime simply has a greater significance than it does at other times. In an environment where to see is to risk being seen and therefore becoming a target, combatants and bystanders alike strive to minimize their visual exposure, ducking behind barriers or seeking refuge in bomb shelters or windowless staircases. In combat, when one looks, one looks quickly, tactically—just long enough to determine the location of a threat or target—before retreating back to the relative safety of not seeing and being unseen. The sounds of combat, by contrast, are more readily, continuously available. Flowing around corners, through windows and walls, their amplitude and their terrible indexicality demand attention. Wartime violence thus enforces a “distribution of the sensible” (Ranciere) in which the audible, in its ubiquity, can at times take precedence over the visible, in its sporadicity. Sound travels farther than touch, faster than odor, and in a more immersive fashion than the visible, which is subject to sight lines and sunrises. Sound is the public modality through which armed violence is most efficiently distributed: one person is penetrated by a bullet, no one sees it fly, but thousands may flinch at its explosive report. (2014: 25–26) Sound is more than sound in a second sense as well: when audible vibrations are produced by violent acts, aspects of the sound and the violent act fuse together to produce new sensory objects that place new demands on those who are exposed to them. Some of these demands are physiological, as when a weapon’s report produces tinnitus and hearing loss in nearby auditors or when the supersonic blast wave from an improvised explosive device (IED) generates traumatic brain injury in survivors. (This wave slows down over time and becomes the characteristic “boom” sound of the IED. In this sense, the trauma from blast waves can be understood as a subspecies of “sound wound.”) Other demands blur the distinction

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between the physiological and psychological. When the sound of a weapon is co-present with the weapon’s projectile or destructive charge, for example, the state of acute vulnerability that the latter creates necessarily affects one’s capacity to listen dispassionately to the former. What does it mean to listen to a sound with a body whose bloodstream is coursing with cortisol and adrenaline, the fight-or-flight chemicals that the body produces when it is in peril? What is it like to listen to a sound knowing that any moment you might be called upon to kill those who made the sound or be killed by them? What is it like to be exposed to a sound that is the intimate by-product of the act of killing? What kind of fear, and ferocity, and exhaustion accompanies such listening acts? In wartime, sound is more than sound. It is simultaneously a vital source of information and a profound source of trauma. It is a sign and a weapon, a signal and an attack, an index and manifestation of violence. In another paradox of wartime listening, there were also times when sound was less than sound. Virtually all of the Iraqi civilians and American military service members I interviewed remarked that the sound of distant gunfire, which caused them to flinch or at least take notice at the beginning of the conflict, ceased to draw their attention over time. The ubiquity of these sounds pushed them outside of the sphere of consciousness, into a conceptual zone my interlocutors and I named “the audible inaudible.” A surprising amount of the constant sonic evidence of wartime violence and societal dysfunction, from the soft popping sounds of distant gun battles to the loud drone of portable gas and diesel generators, was filtered out by the populace. This filtration resulted in a stereotypical situation that took place whenever someone new to the combat zone was walking along with someone who was more “battle-hardened.” At the onset of the sound of automatic weapon fire in the distance, the new auditor would exclaim, “What was that?” To this, the longerterm auditor would reply, “What was what? Oh that! That’s probably just the Mahdi Army shooting at the Sunnis—who knows?” This attenuation of the sensible—which also occurs in peacetime environments, as most urban dwellers can attest—has profound ethical ramifications for wartime auditors. To wit: if one is incapable of registering the fact that people are being shot off in the distance, one’s ability to engage in ethical thinking (e.g. to help or not to help, to mourn or not to mourn) is rendered defunct. To be clear, the filtering out of distant gunfire was not a conscious choice of wartime auditors: the exigencies of life in the battle zone forced entire populations to push the sounds of violence beyond the bounds of consciousness. In this way, the “soundscape of war” contributes to the ethical degradation of combatants, targets, and bystanders alike. By attending to the distinctions between wartime sounds’ “undermined” and “overmined” characteristics—between their attenuated (sounds-less-than-sounds) and hyperaggressive (sounds-more-than-sounds) forms—we come to understand the degree to which human auditors are not the sovereigns of their soundscapes but rather contingent and fragile creatures enmeshed within them. One doesn’t have to succumb to a crude sonic determinism to acknowledge the fact that people (and other creatures)14 are often at the mercy of the sounds that surround and penetrate them. And one doesn’t have to anthropomorphize sounds to acknowledge that they are capable of withdrawing beyond the circle of human perception and thereby of creating their own conditions of inaudibility. These sounds-thatare-more-or-less-than-sounds are equally unavailable to humans for interpretation, and that fact sets an acoustemological limit for all of us.

Voice Studies: From Perception to Politics Like sound studies, voice studies is a transdisciplinary field, involving the performing arts, the humanities and social sciences, hard science, medicine, and technology. Its emergence in the early twentieth century marks the latest chapter in a scholarly fascination

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with vocality dating back at least to Aristotle. In the period since the late 1970s, a number of important books and several journal special issues helped voice studies coalesce as a recognizable ­r ubric in the humanities (Ihde 1976; Clément [1988] 1999; Silverman 1988; ­Appelbaum 1990; ­Poizat 1992; Koestenbaum 1993; Connor 2001; Cavarero 2005; Dolar 2006; ­Neumark,  Gibson, and Leeuwen 2010; Kreiman and Sidtis 2013; LaBelle 2014; Thomaidis and M ­ acpherson 2015). This intellectual ferment, in turn, led to the establishment of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, which published its inaugural issue in 2016, and, within the SEM, the Voice Studies Special Interest Group.15 Empirical and Philosophical Orientations Attempting a definition of this highly variegated collection of scholars and projects, Nina Eidsheim and I (Meizel) have developed an expansive definition of voice studies as involving “work concerned with the material, sonorous, and sensory voice as it is made and imagined in human life” (Eidsheim and Meizel, forthcoming). However, the definition of voice and the connotative cloud surrounding that term vary considerably from one academic discipline to the next. Given this dissensus, any piece of voice studies scholarship must necessarily involve ontological claims about the nature of voice and vocality. In the case of most clinical studies and much applied work designed for a readership of vocal practitioners, these claims are implicit and uninterrogated: voice, we can deduce, is nothing more or less than the intentionally created airborne sound produced by vibrations of human vocal folds (phonation), which is amplified and timbrally filtered by the contours of the vocal tract (resonation). Work within what might be called the “empirical” or “clinical” orientation within voice studies began in a concerted fashion after the invention and refinement of the laryngoscope in the nineteenth century allowed scientists to see phonation in action. In the late twentieth century, notable advances in the study of vocal production included Johann Sundberg’s pioneering work on vocal acoustics and the “singer’s formant” (e.g. Sundberg 1970, 1977) and Ingo Titze’s comprehensive investigations of the acoustic and physiological foundations of voice production (e.g. Titze 1998), both of which have informed clinicians and singing coaches worldwide. More broadly, a large community of laryngologists, neuroscientists, biomechanical engineers, and speech pathologists continue to study the multifarious conditions that affect the sound and timbre of their patients’ voices; these include various types of aphasia, polyps and cancer on the vocal folds, spasmodic dysphonia, laryngitis, reactions to airborne pollution, and acid reflux.16 Approaches to addressing these conditions range from the behavioral to the pharmacological, the surgical, and even the digital. Focusing on individuals with severe speech impairment, speech pathologist Rupal Patel (Jreige, Patel, and Bunnell 2009; Patel 2013; Mills, Bunnell, and Patel 2014) has been leading a team of engineers in the development of a process for creating individualized synthetic voices. Patel’s team ascertains the timbral characteristics of the impaired patient’s voice by recording any vocal sounds she can make; a computer algorithm then blends these with a bank of phonemes recorded by an international collection of volunteer “vocal donors.” This process allows individuals to speak in computerized voices that have been constructed to their unique specifications. In yet another fusion of voice studies and posthumanism, voice scientists are harvesting the collagen matrix from pig larynxes to form the framework upon which stem cells can generate vocal fold tissue to replace cancerous or damaged tissue that had been previously removed (Wrona et al. 2016). This process promises to restore vocal function to a large number of patients whose vocal folds have been severely damaged by disease or accident. These and other clinical and pedagogical projects share a goal of removing physiological, psychological, neurological, and other obstacles to efficacious vocalizing, thereby expanding the population for whom vocality is a profound source of communication, artistic production, and subject formation.

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At the other end of the spectrum, work within the humanities (and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences) often takes the question “What is voice?” to be the central object of investigation, one that overshadows all other concerns.17 Is voice a thing or an event ­(Connor 2001)? A human or transspecies attribute? A logocentric manifestation of thought or a synaesthetic “vibrational practice” (Eidsheim 2015)? A phenomenon essentially connected to sound, or a potentially silent manifestation of identity (Dunn and Jones 1994)? A translation or reflection of an effervescent mind or an always-already gendered, sexed, classed, and racialized text in itself? Is voice irreducibly relational? Is an imagined voice a voice? Are all sounds voices (Ihde 1976)? What is the relationship between voice and the body, voice and cognition, voice and political agency? These and other ontological questions emanate from what one might call the “philosophical orientation” within voice studies. In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of widely read philosophers and theorists took up the question of voice. Perhaps the best known among these is Roland Barthes (1915–1980), whose work searched for what he called “the grain of the voice” (1977). The “grain,” he wrote, is “the body in the voice as it sings … the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs” (188). Developing this idea, Barthes argued that the grain of the voice draws forth not only the embodiment of the singer but that of the listener as well. “If I perceive the ‘grain’…” Barthes observed, “I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing…” (188, our emphasis). More recently, Brandon LaBelle has evoked Barthes’s sensual understanding of the voice and the body, writing that, the mouth is … wrapped up in the voice, and the voice in the mouth, so much so that to theorize the performativity of the spoken is to confront the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and the throat; it is to feel the mouth as a fleshy, wet lining around each syllable, as well as a texturing orifice that marks the voice with specificity, not only in terms of accent or dialect, but also by the depth of expression so central to the body. (2014: 1) In contrast to this celebration of the carnality of the voice, the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) questioned the radical privileging of voice in philosophical studies of language (1976). His questioning took the form of a critique of phonocentrism, which he defined as an untenable belief in the “absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning” (12). Arguing that writing should not be seen as a pale reflection or corruption of a mythical preliterate form of “pure” vocal communion, Derrida’s critique of the “metaphysics of presence” provides a corrective against the tendency, still found in some voice- and sound-studies work, to treat the immersive pleasures of listening as the ontological foundation of meaning. Perhaps, he seems to be saying, there are layers of mediation that are always-already inserting distances among the self, the voice, and the word it speaks. Compared to the writings of Barthes and Derrida, the lectures of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (originally delivered in 1962 and 1963, and published in full in 2004) are more ­radical—and for many readers, more opaque.18 Building on Freud’s concern with taboo body parts and products, Lacan (1901–1981) understood the voice as a “partial object” (objet petit a), a category that includes the breast, urinary tract, penis, and feces. Partial objects are irreducibly “other,” meaning that they always exist in excess of their utility; they symbolize an unspeakable, unfulfillable desire. Voice, for Lacan, is a transcendental category, separate from the speaker and the sound of that which is spoken; paradoxically, it manifests as an absence, the black hole that sits at the center of the human vocal emissions we hear, enabling them but always-already obscured by them, like the string that holds together a strand of pearls.19 Following Lacan, philosopher Mladen Dolar has argued:

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what language and the body have in common is the voice, but the voice is part neither of language nor of the body. The voice stems from the body, but is not its part, and it upholds language without belonging to it, yet, in this paradoxical topology, this is the only point they share … . (2006: 73) In the hands of many Western psychoanalysts and philosophers—Derrida ­notwithstanding— voice is portrayed as an uncanny, slippery, transgressive phenomenon, a kind of liminal eraser that blurs the lines that separate interiority from exteriority, body from language, individual from society. In short, the philosophical orientation treats the voice as a crucible for understanding the complexities of the human condition. Far more than a simple sonic event or a mere vehicle for communication or art, voice is, in this view, a surrogate for the essential enigma of the self.20 Despite their manifest differences, the philosophical and clinical orientations in voice studies share an understanding of voice as a universal, pre- or pan-cultural category; voice, for Sundberg and Titze and Barthes and Lacan alike, is a single broad phenomenon, albeit one that encompasses many second-order variations and pathologies. Cultural and individual difference, in other words, add complexity to voice without challenging its ontological stability. If this is one’s ground assumption, then by experimenting with a single population of vocalists, or by contemplating voice within a purportedly neutral field of introspection, one’s conclusions can be smoothly extrapolated to humanity in the broadest sense. It should not be surprising then that clinical studies and philosophical investigations of voice frequently present Western vocal practices, and the bel canto singing voice in particular, as emblematic of vocality tout court. (A notable exception to this view is philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s insistence that the voice is an essentially plural phenomenon [2005].) One might call scholarship that presents voice in these terms the “universalist camp” of voice studies. Vocal Anthropologies As productive and provocative as universalist theories of voice have been for scholars throughout the humanities, they have tended to obscure other theorizations, other local conceptions of what voices are or should be. Amanda Weidman’s call for a “critical anthropology of voice” (2003: 196) and the call by Feld and his colleagues for a “vocal anthropology” (Feld et al., 2004) signal an abiding interest among ethnographers (and perhaps especially among ethnomusicologists) in the multifarious and often conflicting roles that vocal expressions and epistemologies play within histories of musical practice, intra- and inter-cultural communication, and the articulation of cultural difference. ­A nthropological authors differ greatly from those who write within the universalist paradigm. Substantively, their work tends to be particularist and constructivist, critiquing the universalist assumptions embedded in the work above and asserting that the dynamics of situated vocal praxes cannot be ignored. As Weidman argues in a recent review of anthropological literature on voice: Rather than assume the universal significance of the voice, anthropology should ask where and when “voice” becomes a salient metaphor and what is at stake in it. It should inquire into how practices involving the voice—including performance, singing, oratory, pedagogy, entextualization, writing, technological mediation—support these metaphorical elaborations. What forms of subjectivity, identity, and public and political life are enabled, and silenced, by particular regimes of aurality and the voice? (2014: 38)

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Weidman’s own ethnographic work is exemplary in this regard, demonstrating how the widespread equation of “voice” with Enlightenment concepts of agency, self, and essence fails to obtain cleanly within the world of female Karnatic singing in twentieth-century South India (2006).21 In a similar vein, Matthew Rahaim’s Musicking Bodies (2012) charts the layered understandings of voice in Hindustani musical practice and the idiomatic ways vocalists use movement along with their melodic practices in spatial, temporal, and ethical contexts. Nicholas Harkness’s Sounds of Seoul (2013) demonstrates how the indexical charge of Western operatic singing can be radically recoded and invested with new agencies to fit the needs of evangelical Korean Christians. And Jessica Schwartz’s ethnographic work among Marshallese vocalists whose bodies were irradiated by American atomic tests demonstrates how the voice can be simultaneously an expressive instrument and an index of a long history of environmental violence (2015). By directing ethnographic attention to the cultural emplacement of vocal praxes, these and other ethnomusicologists actively contribute not just to our understanding of “voice” per se, but to the silent structures and sustained discourses that shape the way voices are heard, used, and imagined. Some scholars have combined ethnographic approaches with ideas and methods from auditory cognition. An often-cited example of this work is Cornelia Fales’s 2002 article “The Paradox of Timbre,” which encourages ethnomusicologists to attend equally to three realms of sound: production (the physical means by which instruments and the body produce sound), acoustics (the structure of sound waves themselves), and perception (which includes the physiological processes of the ear itself, cognitive activities in the nervous system and brain, and acoustemologies learned within communities of auditors). Fales demonstrates the necessity of such a model through an analysis of the Burundian genre Inanga Chuchotée (whispered Inanga), in which an unvoiced whisper and the harmonics of the inanga zither combine in a way that Burundian listeners hear as voiced, melodized text. If a pitch-centric Western scholar were to only discuss what they think they heard as vocal timbre, they would have failed to account for the ways the sounds are produced, the interacting structures of the component sounds, and the manner in which their own cognition and cultural position informed their perception of the sound. And importantly, they would have neglected the distinctively Burundian perception of the sounds. Through a patient investigation of discrete vocal praxes, this kind of ethnographic writing opens up a space for questioning the hegemony of Western conceptions of voice and for attending to situated vocalities and auralities that might otherwise go unnoticed. Voice and Embodiment A central concern for ethnographic and historical research on the voice is the relationships among vocality, embodiment, and identity. For example, a well-known article by Feld and his co-authors argues that the voice is the body’s chief technology of difference: it is the site in which we aurally distinguish self and other, and therefore interpret identities and individualities (2004). This is especially noteworthy considering what Eidsheim terms “performative listening” (2009). Eidsheim argues that the performance of identity takes place not only at the site of the performer’s embodied voice, but also in the listener’s interpretation of it, and that it is the audience, as much as the singer, that shapes vocal constructions of identity. (On performativity and identity, see Waterman, this volume.) As the mediating term between two polarities, the voice is critical for the negotiation of all manner of boundaries. In many times and places, voice has been coded as more feminine than masculine, and more sensual than intellectual;22 this persistent sexual valence has been mobilized within many vocal praxes to negotiate, maintain, exploit, critique, and transgress hegemonic masculinities and other social structures. The “vocalic body,” in Steven Connor’s phrase, is more

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malleable than the corporeal body; it is “a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice” (2001: 35). Musicologists Martha Feldman and Suzanne Cusick have made complementary arguments. Feldman argues that voice operates “at the border of the ­human” and the non-human (2015: 658), and Cusick suggests that it “perform[s] the borders of the body” (1999: 29), so that voice, which at its creation leaves the body, highlights those borders by crossing them. “All voices, but especially singing voices,” Cusick continues, “… perform those borders’ relationship both to the body’s interior and to the exterior world, a relationship that in late twentieth-century culture can be gendered in terms of the borders’ relative penetrability.” Building on this work, performance studies scholar Elías Krell writes about the voice of “queer, transgender, and Latin@ folk/punk musician” Yva las Vegass, arguing that it can best be understood as operating within a framework of “sonic borderlands,” ones of gender, sexuality, and cultural identity (2015: 95). In this work, the voice is understood as a sociopolitical phenomenon where physiological structures meet power structures and where social boundaries are negotiated.23 In the United States, the most tragic and traumatizing of these boundaries is that which reifies the fraught social category of race. An important strain of voice scholarship analyzes the auditory regimes that undergird ideologies of blackness and whiteness; scholars such as Eidsheim (2009), Derrick Valliant (2002), Geoff Mann (2008), and Grant Olwage (2004) have shown how historically contingent hearings of “black voices” and “white voices” have led to essentialist understandings of racial difference and unequal access to social privilege. This argument is given a thorough treatment in Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s 2016 monograph The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. Building on a lineage of critical scholarship on race that stretches from W. E. B. Du Bois ([1903] 1997) to Alexander Weheliye (2014) and Fred Moten (2003), Stoever traces the trajectory of American white supremacy, emphasizing the historicized listening practices that accompanied and shaped it. These practices collectively construct and police the “sonic color line,” an auditory regime that interprets sounds according to the unforgiving terms of the racial binary. While any sound can be racially encrypted (e.g. “the clang and rumble of urban life” that was widely read as a type of black noise against the implicitly white “suburban ‘peace and quiet’”; p. 11), voices have been supersaturated with racialized ideologies throughout American history. When these ideologies intersect with gendered readings of vocality, the results can be particularly toxic. As Stoever explains: In certain contexts … a black woman’s scream is heard differently from a white ­woman’s, even if both screams displayed similar properties of pitch, tone, timbre, and volume; the sonic color line maps divergent impacts and meanings for these two sounds, as dependent on the race and gender of the listener as they are on the perceived race and gender of the screamer. [Frederick] Douglass, for instance, notices the sound of his Aunt Hester screaming caused the slave master to whip her harder and longer, while in [Richard] Wright’s fiction, even the thought of a white woman screaming sets murders, lynchings, and mass migrations in motion. (22, emphasis in the original) Hearing voices through filters of essentialized difference conjures social hierarchies of personhood that contradict the general humanist equation of voice with agency. Based on their relative positions vis-à-vis the sonic color line (and extrapolating the sonic gender line with which the color line intersects), some voices are assigned more meaning and gravity than others. This process is not unique to the United States, of course. Ochoa Gautier’s work on aurality in the history of European colonialism in Colombia demonstrates the critical

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role that ideas about the voice have played in discourses of modernity and the practice of ­European imperialism in the global south (2014). Analyzing writings from the early colonization of the Americas, Ochoa Gautier shows how indigenous voices were constructed by Western listeners as wild and unruly, their “untamed vocality” requiring the civilizing hand of Europeans. Instances of these kinds of racist interpretations can be found everywhere that European colonialism spread. For example, the sixteenth-century Calvinist missionary Jean de Léry took notes as he watched a Tupinambá ritual in Portuguese Brazil, describing what he perceived as a transformation of “tuneable” and “pleasing” voices into “muttering,” “trembling,” and “howl[ing],” what de Léry inferred must have indicated possession by the Devil (de Léry [1578] 2010). As the British Empire’s holdings peaked in the late nineteenth century, voice was often held up as an explicit site of difference between the peoples of the world. In an 1869 paper delivered to the Anthropological Society of London, for example, laryngologist Sir G. Duncan Gibb called Europe “the cradle of song” and positioned ­European voices as superior to all others (1870: 258). (For a history of the critical scholarship on race and the performance of racial identity in music, see Mahon [this volume]. On European colonialism and music, see Wallach and Clinton [this volume].) Historical discourses about identity and voice continue to shape contemporary interpretations, and some of the most sophisticated analyses of the politics of voice have come from critics who are also practicing artists. In The Right To Speak (1992), theatrical voice coach Patsy Rodenburg warns her readers to look for what she calls “vocal imperialism,” the idea that there can only be “one right voice” (105)—a hegemonic model that singer and musicologist John Potter identifies in his work as “vocal authority” ([1998] 2006). And Tanya Tagaq, perhaps the most prominent performer within the vibrant world of contemporary Indigenous art and activism, has positioned her vocal art as, in part, a critique of settler colonialism in general and violence toward Indigenous women in particular. In reference to her 2016 album Retribution, which addresses the rape, murder, and disappearance of Indigenous women, as well as the metaphorical “rape” of the environment and of Inuk culture, Tagaq says, “if my singing is a platform to help these issues being raised … then I will do it with love, with laughter and with fists” (Tagaq quoted in Presley 2016).24 Collective Vocality For centuries, the trope of voice has been a prominent feature of nationalist projects. Arguing that narratives and songs found in rural traditions capture the heart of national identities, the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) famously used voice as a metaphor for community and individual agency. His version of the concept “the voice of the people” (1807) became a cornerstone of both nascent republican democracy and Romantic nationalism (Gibson 2015), and continues to inform nationalist discourses around the world today. Ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman, who has translated and compiled Herder’s writings on music, observes that Herder’s use of “voice” was especially significant in articulating singing and song as human acts of personal and cultural agency, rather than as originating from the divine (Herder and Bohlman 2017: 47). Used for both essentializing and empowering ends, Herder’s ideas about voice have continually infused political discourse. It’s not at all surprising, then, that the movement for Baltic independence from the Soviet Union would come to be called “the singing revolution,” in recognition of the power of its choral protests (Šmidchens 2014). Nor is it surprising that, in his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump would declare to his followers, “I am your voice!”25 The many nuanced associations of voice with power and agency—both individual and collective—inspired Leslie Dunn and Nancy Jones to encourage a shift in music scholarship

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“from a concern with the phenomenological roots of voice to a conception of vocality as a cultural construct” and as a site for the making of “non-verbal meanings” (1994: 2, emphasis ours). Dunn and Jones define vocality more broadly than voice, assigning to it “all of the voice’s manifestations”—speaking, singing, crying, laughing, and other content, both linguistic and non-linguistic. A range of other scholars have developed the notion of vocality. For example, Feld and his co-authors have observed that, because voice is often understood in anthropology as “a metaphor for difference” and as a “key representational trope for identity, power, conflict, social position, and agency,” the term vocality is frequently seen as a kind of “social practice that is everywhere locally understood as an implicit index of authority, evidence, and experiential truth” (2006: 341). And Cathy Berberian defined vocalities as “‘ways of being’ for the voice” ([1966] 2014: 47). Contemporary ideas about vocality have also been informed by the work of the literary scholar, linguist, and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), who famously developed his understanding of voice in his critical studies of the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. For Bakhtin, voice is “the speaking personality, the speaking consciousness. A voice always has a will or desire behind it, its own timbre and overtones” (Bakhtin 1981: 434). This is not to say that Bakhtin saw voice as narrowly personal. In any situation, voice is comprised of both the utterance (a concrete act of speaking in a social setting) and all of the ideologies that are embedded within it (see Park-Fuller 1986); as a result, every utterance contains traces of multiple languages (heteroglossia) and multiple voices (polyphony). In the context of a complex text, such as a novel, there will always be a range of voices, and an author can handle them in many ways. Bakhtin argued that, in his novels, author Fyodor Dostoyevsky threw himself into the characters and their dialogic intersubjectivities.26 His writing thus highlights the ability of an individual utterance to embody someone else’s ideas while still remaining itself, thus creating a dialogic relationship between the two (Park-Fuller 1986). In Dostoyevsky’s work, Bakhtin therefore finds “[a] plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (1984: 6, emphasis in original). In the original Russian, Bakhtin used the word mnogogolosie to refer to this plurality, and that term has been translated in various ways, including, “polyphony,” “polyvocality,” and “multi-voicedness” (e.g. Belova et al. 2008: 494). The linguist Jacob Mey (1998) glosses the word as “multivocality,” which he interprets as the management of the many voices inherent in the dialogic speech act. In a forthcoming monograph, which I (Meizel) discuss in the next section, I attempt to re-embody the notion of multivocality, anchoring it in the lived experiences of singers who work on and across borders of identity. These singers use or have used their voices in multiple ways and in multiple registers as they negotiate spaces, social contexts, and ways of being.

A Case Study in the Music Cultures of Deafness My current research examines the work of vocalists who balance both Deaf and hearing cultures, using sign languages as well as oral speech and song. Because voice is at the center of a long history of oppression for d/Deaf people and sign languages form the foundations of Deafness as a cultural identity, these singers are constantly crossing borders in their personal and professional lives. One such performer is rock singer TL Forsberg, who identifies as Deaf. Forsberg experienced hearing loss as a child but can sometimes manage her daily life using hearing aids. “I am audiologically dependent for a Deaf person,” she told me in a 2013 interview. “I hear [what someone says] first, and then I say ‘say it again,’ and then my eyes will pick it up. … Because I was born hearing, I’m rigged that way.” In the 2010 documentary See What I’m Saying?, ­Forsberg discusses a feeling of being caught between two cultures, detailing how others—directors, music

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producers, friends—press her to act “more deaf ” or “more hearing.” These experiences have led her to become an advocate for Deaf diversity and have influenced her performance practices. She has performed her music on stage by signing in ASL (American Sign Language) and lip-syncing to her own pre-recorded voice (a practice she calls “sign-syncing”), and she also interprets the voices of other singers for Deaf congregants at a Los Angeles church. Forsberg understands her singing and her signing as two distinct embodied voices, ones that are often in conflict with each other, creating a complex and nuanced multivocality. Forsberg is not the only singer who must negotiate between different social worlds. Mandy Harvey, a jazz singer profoundly deaf since the age of eighteen, likewise feels both part of and excluded from the Deaf community. Without full hearing, her experience of voice has changed dramatically. For all singers, vocalization depends heavily on kinesthetic, tactile, and aural sensory feedback, but such forms of perception are particularly important for deaf vocalists. Harvey remembers how her voice sounded before she became deaf, but her sense of her singing voice is no longer audiocentric; rather, she has shifted her focus to internal sensations—what Straus, discussed above, calls “deaf hearing.” In interviews, Harvey told me that she is “hyperaware” of her entire body’s relationship with sound, and she has adjusted her musical practices to accommodate her deafness. On stage, she performs without shoes, so that she can feel the vibrations of her bandmates’ instruments through the floor. In our interviews, she explained that, in this way, she is able to discern information such as the pulse and the progress of the music’s structure in time, as well as which instrument is playing. She also relies upon her absolute pitch to learn new repertoire directly from sheet music. She establishes middle C using a tuner or with the help of another person, and then is able to sing all of the other pitches in the composition. Onstage, she signs for the benefit of Deaf audience members, though she tends to combine ASL with the controversial word-for-word types of sign interpreting developed by non-Deaf people for pedagogical purposes. On occasion, she simply signs a summary of a song or provides the audience with printouts of lyrics. In some performances, her venue’s sound system is connected to a “hearing loop” (an electromagnetic transmitter that sends a signal to hearing aids and cochlear implants worn by audience members). Additionally, she likes to increase the amplitude of her band’s drums and bass to allow d/Deaf attendees to more clearly feel the vibrations. The multiple modes of her performance—in song and in sign—negotiate both Deaf and hearing culture in a multivocality that is unique to her experience and different from Forsberg’s. The experiences of Forsberg and Harvey challenge the idea that deafness might be defined as an oppositional relationship with voice or with sound. Their work highlights the complexity of the relationship between speech and singing, and positions the simultaneous performance of singing and signing as more than the juxtaposition of two languages but as the juxtaposition of two vocalities—two separate if intertwined ways of embodying and enacting identity. If vocality involves an acoustic, physiological, cultural way of being, then signing-while-singing is as much an expression of vocality as any act performed by a hearing person and exemplifies multivocality as a strategy of cultural border-crossing. Forsberg’s and Harvey’s experiences suggest a broad potential for ethnomusicological research that expands the study of sound and voice beyond aurality and orality. *** Coursing through the realms of the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead, and through environmental and mediatized spaces, the study of sound and its most cathected manifestation, voice, promises to coax ethnomusicology out of its hothouse province, in which, as anthropologist Michelle Bigenho (2009) has trenchantly observed, music

196  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry

performance too often becomes a beguiling object of study whose status as a “special realm” renders it resistant to critique. The broader spectrum of sonic acts and vocal practices cannot be so easily essentialized, and that is surely a healthy thing. One can imagine a near future in which ethnomusicology adopts the more expansive horizons of sound studies and voice studies, becoming in practice a full-fledged anthropology of music, sound, and voice—even if, for logistical reasons, its anachronistic name remains.27 Conversely, ethnomusicology as it is currently practiced involves an attentiveness to and respect for the messy complexities of social experience, and especially for local epistemologies that point to domains (of music and other behaviors) that extend well beyond “sound,” “voice,” and the Enlightenment metaphysics that continue to characterize Western discourse on these concepts. Sound studies and voice studies need these ethnographically informed perspectives if they are to diversify and relativize the Western epistemologies that continue to dominate their thinking. We conclude by observing that the commingling of ethnomusicology, sound studies, and voice studies that we have described here is taking place at a moment of great intellectual flux, social disruption, and environmental crisis. The permeability and fragility of ­borders—be they national, economic, intellectual, or disciplinary—increases the potential both for fruitful exchange and inclusivity, as well as for proliferating injustices, backlash, and the precarity we discussed above. In tumultuous times such as these, it behooves us all to increase the inclusivity of our institutions and practices, and to work to reduce the injustices that they produce. With this in mind, and building on the tradition of internal critique that we inherited from anthropology, ethnomusicologists need to accept an obligation towards sound studies and voice studies that is as simple to state as it is difficult to implement: we must, as we continue to decolonize ourselves, help decolonize them.

Notes 1 Embodiment is a central theme in contemporary scholarship and is addressed in many of the chapters in this book. See Text Box 1.1. 2 On the significance of Sound and Sentiment for linguistic approaches in ethnomusicology, see B ­ easter-Jones (this volume). 3 Other texts that laid the foundation for sound studies include Schafer (1977), Corbin (1998), and Chion (1994). 4 On Feld’s acoustemology and theories of participation, see Rahaim (this volume). 5 At the opening of his landmark treatise Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999: xxxix), Friedrich Kittler sums up the technological determinist position in a pithy sentence: “Media determine our situation.” Early historiographic work on sound and music technologies often reinscribed this position by emphasizing the impact that revolutionary new products had on listeners and giving short shrift to the agentive powers and diverse interpretations of the listeners themselves. (See also McLuhan [1964] 1994.) 6 Within ethnomusicology, see Feld and Brenneis (2004) for a prolonged discussion of this topic. Within sound studies, Emily Thompson (Thompson and Mahoy n.d., discussed below) is a good example of a scholar who presents sound recording as a mode of investigation. 7 This album also includes “Aerial,” a track featuring Steven Feld. 8 In a discussion of “sonological competence,” Schafer (1994: 154) similarly points to the variability of listening, but his conclusions generally remain speculative and broad (such as arguing that “the Eskimo’s space awareness is acoustic,” in contrast to the visually constituted space of the West). 9 The term “habitus” refers to sets of bodily practices, dispositions, and ideas which are internalized by members of a society and which contribute to that society’s reproduction. The term has a long history in philosophy and social theory, but it was most famously elaborated by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ([1972] 1977) and today is widely associated with his work. See also Manuel (this volume), Sugarman (this volume), and Text Box 2.1. 10 I (Meizel) would like to thank to Kelly Gervin for introducing me to Pedelty’s work. 11 Here, we are using the term “network” in the sense of the term developed by science and technology scholar Bruno Latour (2007). Within the context of Actor Network Theory, a critical orientation Latour helped establish, a network is a gloss for the dynamic and fluid gatherings of human and

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12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27

non-human actors that end up having social effects in the world. “Instead of thinking in terms of surfaces—two dimension—or spheres—three dimension,” Latour writes, “one is asked to think in terms of nodes that have as many dimensions as they have connections” (1996: 3). Ethnomusicologist Judith Becker has applied the notion of deep listening to the specific context of music, proposing a physiological correlation between highly emotional experiences of music and religious trance (2004). See Waterman (this volume) for a discussion of Deborah Wong’s chapter in Kapchan’s book, which explores audition and witnessing (2017). On the role of listening in theories of participation, see Rahaim (this volume). Neurologist Oliver Sacks believed that music-color synesthesia is among the most common forms of synesthesia, one of a multitude of physiological experiences “dependent on the integrity of certain areas of the cortex and the connections between them” (2007: 179). See Brumm and Slabbekoorn (2005) and Putland, Merchant, Farcas, and Radford (2017) for evidence of anthropogenic noise interfering with human and nonhuman animal communication. The Society for Ethnomusicology Voice Studies Special Interest Group was founded in 2012 and initially chaired by Eve McPherson and myself (Meizel). Other scholarly societies have established groups whose purviews extend to voice and vocality. The Radio Studies Scholarly Interest Group within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, for example, takes on issues of aurality, mediation, and acousmatic vocal performance that are central to voice studies. For a helpful overview of neuroscientific work on voice production, perception, and processing, see Sidtis and Kreiman (2011). Social scientific research on the voice is closely linked to phonology (a subdiscipline of linguistics that examines systems of speech sounds), other branches of linguistics, and semiotics (the study of sign systems). On linguistic and semiotic approaches in ethnomusicology, see Beaster-Jones (this volume). Both Derrida and Lacan were part of a broad movement in the humanities known as p­ ost-structuralism. For more on post-structuralism, see Sugarman (this volume). For a Lacanian reading of voice as an immaterial, invisible string, see Dolar (2006: 23). For a cogent overview of Lacan’s conception of voice, see Lagaay (2008). See Daughtry (2016) for a fuller articulation of this position. On the eighteenth-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, see ­Sugarman (this volume, n9). Adriana Cavarero (2005: 6) charts how voice has historically been coded as “secondary, ephemeral, inessential—reserved for women.” “Feminized from the start,” she writes, “the vocal aspect of speech and, furthermore, of song appear together as antagonistic elements in a rational, masculine sphere that centers itself, instead, on the semantic.” For a discussion of border spaces in the context of performance, ethnography, and liminality, see Waterman (this volume). For a critical analysis of media responses to Tagaq and the “ideologies of voice” (Weidman 2014) that they covertly promote, see Taylor-Neu (2018). The history of the demagogic appropriation of a collective’s vocal agency is long and dark, encompassing despots from the Peróns in Argentina to Adolph Hitler himself. In an essay by none other than Joseph Goebbels (1936), the Fuhrer’s voice was placed in tight relation to the will of the nation: “[Hitler’s] word alone was enough to transform an entire period, to defeat an apparently strong state and to bring in a new era … . The magic of his voice reaches men’s secret feelings … . In Germany, God chose one from countless millions to speak our pain!” Additionally, Trump’s pronouncement unwittingly replicates the famously sensual lines from an early fragment of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” “I am your voice—it was tied in you—in me it begins to talk. /I celebrate myself to celebrate every man and woman alive; /I loosen the tongue that was tied in them, /It begins to talk out of my mouth” (2003). Presumably, neither Whitman’s inclusive sentiment nor his orgiastic tone was what the President had in mind. For other discussions of Bakhtin, see Titunik (1986) and Beaster-Jones (this volume). Internal critiques of the label ethnomusicology date back at least to Feld’s call for an anthropology of sound in the 1980s. See Feld (2017) for a narration of this line of thinking.

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200  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. “Transduction.” In Keywords in Sound Studies, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 222–31. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1807. Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (The voices of the people in song). Edited by Johann von Müller. 2nd ed. Tübingen: J. G. Cotta. Herder, Johann Gottfried, and Philip V. Bohlman. 2017. Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism. Oakland: University of California Press. Hirschkind, Charles. 2009. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Howes, David, ed. 2009. The Sixth Sense Reader. London: Berg. Ihde, Don. 1976. Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens: Ohio University Press. Jreige, Camil, Rupal Patel, and H. Timothy Bunnell. 2009. “VocaliD: Personalizing Text-to-Speech ­Synthesis for Individuals with Severe Speech Impairment.” In Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, edited by Shari Trewin, 259–60. New York: ACM. Kapchan, Deborah, ed. 2017. Theorizing Sound Writing. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Karantonis, Pamela, and Dylan Robinson, eds. 2011. Opera Indigene: Re/Presenting First Nations and Indigenous Cultures. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Katz, Mark. 2010. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kheshti, Roshanak. 2018. “Toward a Rupture in the Sensus Communis: On Sound Studies and the Politics of Knowledge Production.” Current Musicology 99–100 (Spring): 7–20. Kim, Christine Sun. 2015. Ted Fellows Retreat 2015: The Enchanting Music of Sign Language. https://www. ted.com/talks/christine_sun_kim_the_enchanting_music_of_sign_language #t-403121. Kittler, Friedrich A. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Writing Science). Translated by Geoffrey ­Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Koestenbaum, Wayne. 1993. The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. New York: Poseidon Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kreiman, Jody, and Diana Sidtis. 2013. Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Krell, Elías. 2015. “‘Who’s the Crack Whore at the End?’ Performance, Violence, and Sonic Borderlands in the Music of Yva las Vegass.” Text and Performance Quarterly 35 (2–3): 95–118. KRS-One. 1993. “Sound of Da Police.” Return of the Boom Bap. Sony Music. Compact Disc. Kubisch, Christina. n.d. “Electric Walks: Electromagnetic Investigations in the City.” Accessed July 31, 2018. http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/works/electrical_walks. LaBelle, Brandon. 2014. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. New York: Bloomsbury. Lacan, Jacques. 2004. Le Séminaire. Livre X: L’Angoisse, edited by J. Miller. Paris: Seuil. Lagaay, Alice. 2008. “Between Sound and Silence: Voice in the History of Psychoanalysis.” Episteme 1 (1): 53–62. Latour, Bruno. 1996. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications Plus More than a Few Complications.” Soziale Welt 47: 369–81. ———. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levin, Theodore Craig. 2006. Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond. With Valentina Süzükei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. López, Francisco. 1998. La Selva: Sound Environments from a Neotropical Rain Forest. Sub Rosa SRV346, LP. Mann, Geoff. 2008. “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31: 73–100. McKay, George. 2013. Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) 1994. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meizel, Katherine. 2011. “A Powerful Voice: Studying Vocality and Identity.” In “A World of Voice: Voice and Speech across Cultures and Other Contemporary Issues in Professional Voice & Speech Training,” special issue, Voice and Speech Review 7: 267–73.

Sound Studies and Voice Studies  201 ———. Forthcoming. Multivocality: An Ethnography of Singing on the Borders of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press. Merriam, Alan P. 1962. “The African Idiom in Music.” Journal of American Folklore 75 (296): 120–30. ———. 1977. “Music Change in a Basongye Village.” Anthropos 72 (5/6): 806–46. Mey, Jacob L. 1998. When Voices Clash: A Study in Literary Pragmatics. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Miller, Kiri. 2009. “Schizophonic Performance: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Virtual Virtuosity.” Journal of the Society for American Music 3 (4): 395–429. ———. 2017. Playable Bodies: Dance Games and Intimate Media. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Mara. 2015. “Deafness.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 45–54. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mills, Timothy H., Timothy Bunnell, and Rupal Patel. 2014. “Towards Personalized Speech Synthesis for Augmentative and Alternative Communication.” Augmentative and Alternative Communication 30(3): 226–36. Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2007. Listening. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. National Sounds Program. n.d. Natural Sounds. Accessed July 31, 2018. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ sound/index.htm. Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1999. “Inuit Thorat Games and Siberian Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach.” Ethnomusicology 43 (3): 399–418. Neufeld, Janina, Mandy Roy, Antonia Zapf, Christopher Sinke, Hinderk M. Emrich, Vanessa ProxVagedes, Wolfgang Dillo, and Markus Zedler. 2013. “Is Synesthesia More Common in Patients With Asperger Syndrome?” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Vol. 7, article 847. https://www.­ frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00847/full?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium= web&utm_campaign=Neuroscience-w6-2014. Neumark, Norie, Ross Gibson, and Theo van Leeuwen, eds. 2010. VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. 2015. Keywords in Sound. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Colombia. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2016. “Acoustic Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature of Music in Ecomusicology.” Boundary 2 43 (1): 107–41. Oliveros, Pauline. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York: iUniverse. Olwage, Grant. 2004. “The Class and Colour of Tone: An Essay on the Social History of Vocal Timbre.” Ethnomusicology Forum 13 (2): 203–26. Orejuela, Fernando, and Stephanie Shonekan, eds. 2018. Black Lives Matter and Music: Protest, Intervention, Reflection. Activist Encounters in Folklore and Ethnomusicology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Park-Fuller, Linda M. 1986. “VOICES: Bakhtin’s Heteroglossial and Polyphony, and the Performance of Narrative Literature.” Literature in Performance 7: 1–12. http://www.csun.edu/~vcspc00g/604/­voiceslpf.html. Patel, Rupal. 2013. “Synthetic Voices, As Unique as Fingerprints.” TEDWomen 2013. https://www.ted. com/talks/rupal_patel_synthetic_voices_as_unique_as_fingerprints. Pedelty, Mark. 2012. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poizat, Michel. 1992. The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera. Translated by Arthur Denner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Potter, John. (1998) 2006. Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Presley, Katie. 2016. “Review: Tanya Tagaq, ‘Retribution.’” NPR Music: First Listen. https://www.npr. org/2016/10/13/497569725/first-listen-tanya-tagaq-retribution.

202  Katherine Meizel and J. Martin Daughtry Provenzano, Catherine. 2018. “Auto-Tune, Labor, and the Pop Music Voice.” In The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music, edited by Robert Fink, Melinda Latour, and Zachary Wallmark, 159–84. New York: Oxford University Press. Putland, Rosalyn, Nathan Merchant, Adrian Farcas, and Craig Radford. 2018. “Vessel Noise Cuts Down Communication Space for Vocalizing Fish and Marine Mammals.” Global Change Biology 24(4): 1708–21. Rancier, Megan. 2014. “The Musical Instrument as National Archive: A Case Study of the Kazakh ­Q yl-qobuz.” Ethnomusicology 58 (3): 379–404. Rice, Timothy. 2014. “Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 46: 191–209. Riedelsheimer, Thomas. 2004. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie. Docurama. DVD. Robinson, Dylan, and Keavy Martin, eds. 2016. Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Rodenburg, Patsy. 1992. The Right to Speak. New York: Routledge. Rosen, Jody. 2008. “Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison.” New York Times. March 27. https:// www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27soun.html. Sacks, Oliver. 2007. “The Key of Clear Green.” In Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, 165–83. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Samuels, David W., Louise Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello. 2010. “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 329–45. Schafer, R. Murray. 1969. The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher. Scarborough, ON: Berandol Music Limited. ———. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Schwartz, Jessica. 2015. “Vocal Ability and Musical Performances of Nuclear Damages in the Marshall Islands.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, edited by Blake Howe and Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, 476–95. New York: Oxford University Press. Seeger, Anthony. 1987. Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. New York: ­Cambridge University Press. Sidtis, Diana, and Jody Kreiman. 2011. “The Brain Behind the Voice: Cerebral Models of Voice Production and Perception.” In Foundations of Voice Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Voice Production and Perception, 189–236. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Šmidchens, Guntis. 2014. The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Smith, Bruce R. 1999. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Mark M., ed. 2004. Hearing History: A Reader. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Society for Ethnomusicology. 2010. 2010 Annual Meeting Call for Proposals. http://www.indiana. edu/~semhome/2010/call.shtml. Stadler, Gus. 2015. “On Whiteness and Sound Studies.” Sounding Out! https://soundstudiesblog. com/2015/07/06/on-whiteness-and-sound-studies/. Stanyek, Jason, and Sumanth Gopinath. 2014. “Anytime, Anywhere? An Introduction to the Devices, Markets, and Theories of Mobile Music.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Vol. 1, edited by Jason Stanyek and Sumanth Gopinath, 1–36. New York: Oxford University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———, ed. 2012a. The Sound Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. ———. 2012b. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoever, Jennifer. 2016. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sound Studies and Voice Studies  203 Straus, Joseph N. 2011. Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music. New York: Oxford University Press. Sundberg, Johann. 1970. “Formant Structure and Articulation of Spoken and Sung Vowels.” Folia Phoniatrica 22: 28–48. ———. 1977. “The Acoustics of the Singing Voice.” Scientific American 236 (3): 82–91. Szendy, Peter. 2008. Listen: A History of Our Ears. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Taber, Katherine H., Deborah L. Warden, and Robin A. Hurley. 2006. “Blast-related Traumatic Brain Injury: What Is Known?” Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. 18 (2):141–5. Tagaq, Tanya. 2016. Retribution. Six Shooter Records. Compact Disc. Taylor-Neu, Robyn. 2018. “‘All There Is’: The Reconciliatory Poetics of a Singing Voice.” American Anthropologist 120 (1): 113–25. Thomaidis, Konstantinos, and Ben Macpherson, eds. 2015. Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Emily. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, Emily, and Scott Mahoy. n.d. “The Roaring Twenties: An Interactive Exploration of the Historical Soundscape of New York City.” Accessed, July 31, 2018. http://vectorsdev.usc.edu/­ NYCsound/777b.html. Titiunik, I.R. 1986. “Appendix 2: The Formal Method and the Sociological Method (M. M. Baxtin, P. N. Medvedev, V. N. Vološinov) in Russian Theory and Study of Literature.” In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, by V. N. Vološinov, 175–200. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Titon, Jeff Todd. 2013. “The Nature of Ecomusicology.” Música e Cultura 8. http://musicaecultura.abetmusica.org.br/index.php/revista/article/view/83/18. Titze, Ingo R. 1998. Principles of Voice Production. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Truax, Barry. 1986. “Riverrun.” In Digital Soundscapes: Computer and Electroacoustic Music by Barry Truax. Cambridge Street Records CSR-CD 8701. compact disc. Trump, Donald. 2016. “Donald Trump 2016 RNC Draft Speech Transcript.” July 21. https://www.­ politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-atrnc-225974. Valliant, Derrick. 2002. “Sounds of Whiteness: Local Radio, Racial Formation, and Public Culture in Chicago, 1921–1935.” American Quarterly 54 (1): 25–66. Weheliye, Alexander. 2002. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Social Text 20 (2): 21–47. ———. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weidman, Amanda. 2003. “Gender and the Politics of Voice: Colonial Modernity and Classical Music in South India.” Cultural Anthropology 18 (2): 194–232. ———. 2006. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. “Anthropology and Voice.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43 (1): 37–51. Westerkamp, Hildegard. 2002. “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology.” Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music and Technology 7 (1): 51–56. ———. n.d. Compositions. Accessed August 9, 2018. https://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/compositions. html. Whitman, Walt. 2003. “Early Notebook Fragments of ‘Song of Myself.’” In Selected Poems, edited by Harold Bloom, 3. New York: Library of America. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wong, Deborah. 2014. “Sound, Silence, Music: Power.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 347–53. ———. 2017. “Deadly Soundscapes: Scripts of Lethal Force and Lo-Fi Death.” In Theorizing Sound ­Writing, edited by Deborah Kapchan, 253–76. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Wrona, Emily A., Robert Peng, Hayley Born, Milan R. Amin, Ryan C. Branski, Donald O. Freytes. 2016. “Derivation and Characterization of Porcine Vocal Fold Extracellular Matrix Scaffold.” The Laryngoscope 126 (4): 928–35. Young, Miriama. 2016. Singing the Body Electric: The Human Voice and Sound Technology. London: Routledge.

8 Phenomenology and Phenomenological Ethnomusicology Approaches to the Lived Experience of Music Harris M. Berger Perhaps even more than the works that she cites, the methodologies that she employs, or the conferences that she attends, a scholar’s fundamental orientation in research is the thing that most viscerally defines her disciplinary identity. This is particularly true in ethnomusicology, at least in North America, where there are relatively few departments of ethnomusicology and most graduates in the field do not have the word “ethnomusicology” written on their diploma. There is, of course, great intellectual diversity in our field. But if there is anything like a common denominator in the discipline today, a concern for the lived experience of music would be high on the short list of candidates for the position. Following a long tradition of anthropological work that saw its most fully developed articulation in the thought of Clifford Geertz (e.g. 1973), a large portion of scholars in our field want to understand music from the perspective of the people who make it and listen to it (see Berger and Stone, introduction, this volume). Indeed, when we read the work of someone from an adjacent field, the thing that makes them seem to be part of our world is our intuition that this author sees music as playing out in the context of the social life of a person or group, and wants to capture the texture of musical experience as it is lived there. Where a scholar might go with such an orientation can vary widely, of course, and not all ethnomusicologists embrace the interpretive project. But for many of us, centering on experience—or at least starting there—is the hallmark of ethnomusicology. For this reason, phenomenology has been a particularly compelling theoretical orientation in our field. While phenomenology is a diverse intellectual tradition with many strong disagreements among its leading figures, the idea of lived experience is central to much of the tradition. This is not to say that ideas from phenomenology can be easily brought into conversation with those from ethnomusicology; much work has to be done to make concepts that were sown in philosophy bear fruit in ethnomusicology. But, to use the contemporary parlance that would have been unfamiliar to its early twentieth-century founders, phenomenology is the intellectual movement that has most richly theorized the notion of experience. And because of that, it has attracted diverse and passionate adherents in our field. It would be impossible, of course, to summarize the ideas of the philosophical tradition in single chapter. My goal instead is to give a sense of the styles of thinking and major ideas that have developed from this tradition, sketch out its intellectual history, show some of the ways that ethnomusicologists have drawn on this tradition to make unique insights, and point the way toward future directions for research.

Phenomenology: The Philosophical Tradition The word “phenomenology” had been in at least occasional use for over a hundred and fifty years when Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) published his Logical Investigations ([1900–1901] 2001) and adopted the term as the name of the new form of philosophy he was developing

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(Smith 2013). In older philosophical work, as well as in many non-technical usages of the term today, to do “phenomenology” meant simply to talk about experience, with this term understood as an internal and subjective state. Husserl’s phenomenology was concerned with experience, but he approached the topic very differently from the thinkers that preceded him. Philosophers in the tradition of British empiricism, for example, associated experience with sense data, the mechanical effect of the physical world on our perceptual organs. ­Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German idealist who had such a profound influence on ­Western thought, made a sharp distinction between the things of the world themselves and the entities that populate our consciousness. Kant developed sophisticated arguments to show how categories like time and space where not properties of the things themselves but were projected onto the world by the perceiving subject, and the larger project of the idealist tradition has been to identify the universal nature of the subject. Whether or not one accepts Kant’s ideas about the subjective nature of the categories per se, the vision of this kind of idealism is clearly unsettling, as it posits a yawning and perhaps unbridgeable chasm between our experience and the world that we think we know. That chasm seemed to be widened by the breathtaking advances of the sciences in the nineteenth century, which appeared to depict a world ever more estranged from the one we encounter in everyday life. It was in this context of these ideas and developments that Husserl’s phenomenology was formed. Husserl had great respect for the sciences, but he felt that to have secure knowledge, their intellectual foundations needed to be rethought.1 Science clearly depends on mathematics, but how do we know that mathematics is true? In the mid-nineteenth century, the German philosopher Gottlob Frege had tried to find a firm foundation for mathematics in logic, but Husserl asked what logic itself was based upon. As Anthony Steinbock has argued (2001), Husserl’s answer was what he called “passive synthesis,” the person’s fundamental perceptual and affective engagement with the world ([1926] 2001). Before we create representations in words or mathematical symbols, before thinking, we have a direct embodied engagement with things. This direct embodied engagement closes up that yawning chasm, puts us in touch with the world, and must be the starting point for all inquiry. Husserl developed his ideas on passive synthesis in the middle of his career, but the great methodological advance that set the tone of phenomenology was developed much earlier. Since the time of Plato, Western philosophers had made arguments about the relationship between experience and reality. This seems like a starting place for any metaphysics or ontology, but Husserl suggested that in making an argument about how mere experience related to reality, they had necessarily stacked the philosophical deck. If we want to get at this question in a more rigorous fashion, Husserl argued, we need to place an epoché (set of brackets) around the question of whether experience was internal or external, subjective or objective, and try to describe experience itself ([1913] 1962). When we do this, we find, much to our surprise, that strictly as experience the things of the world maintain their mind-independent character. Taken as experience, the phenomena before me—the pen I hold and the paper upon which I write, for example—aren’t subjective, ephemeral mental representations but things in themselves, part of a world in which I find myself. Operating within the epoché, the project of Husserl’s phenomenology is an attempt to understand structures of lived experience, necessary features of the ways in which the person engages with the things of the world and constitutes them as lived phenomena. Approaching a topic in this way allows us to attend to the richness and complexity of our experience and to understand those rich textures neither as qualities of the world itself nor as subjective meanings pasted onto a meaningless universe, but as the product of our acts of constitution. This constitutive relationship, which puts the person back in touch with the world, is the most basic of the structures of experience that Husserl uncovered, and his term for this is the intentionality of consciousness. To say that consciousness is intentional is to say that

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consciousness never exists by itself but, rather, that all consciousness is always “consciousness of something” ([1913] 1962: 223, italics in the original). Operating within the epoché, the basic descriptive project of Husserlian phenomenology is to understand how we constitute experience in its myriad forms and modalities—perception and thought, memory and imagination, dreams and wakefulness, and the diverse forms of social interaction. One of the hallmarks of a phenomenological perspective is to remove from the word “experience” the connotations of the internal and the ephemeral that this term has in everyday talk. But everyday talk also associates experience with the individual: we think of the novelist who “writes from her experience” or the painter who has a uniquely personal vision. It is no surprise, therefore, that phenomenology has sometimes been misunderstood as an individualistic way of thinking about things. But because phenomenology’s study object is the process of constituting experience (rather than internal, object-like representations of the external world), it allows us to put social relations at the heart of our inquiry. At the end of his Cartesian Meditations ([1931] 1960), Husserl shows that the category person—understood there, very roughly, as a body that has experience—is the necessary precondition for the ideas of both self and other, and that the thoroughgoing sociality of experience is grounded in our embodiment and precedes any form of cognitive activity. As I have argued elsewhere (Berger 1999: 169–73; 2010: 14, 97–104), the constitution of lived experience is best understood as a kind of social practice, in the practice theory sense of that term (see Text Box 2.1); we learn how to build our experiences from those around us, and our constitution of those experiences is not achieved in the isolated mind of the knower but in interactive processes done with others. My discussion so far has broadly focused on Husserl’s philosophical vision, but there is far more to the movement than its founding articulations. Some of Husserl’s followers carried forward his program by developing detailed studies of focused topics within philosophy, such as Roman Ingarden’s work on literature, art, and music ([1933] 1989) or Edith Stein’s research on empathy ([1917] 1989). However, Husserl’s best-known successors took phenomenology in very different directions. Husserl’s most famous student was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Being and Time, his first major text, argues that questions of experience should be subordinated to questions of being, and Heidegger’s work sought to understand both being in general and the distinctive form of human being. From a Heideggerian perspective, Husserl’s idea of intentionality characterized only a portion of human existence; before we are an intentional subject constituting the world in experience, Heidegger argued, we have a pre-reflexive relationship to the world in practical activity. His famous example is from everyday conduct, where he contrasts the situation of a carpenter unproblematically hammering a nail into a piece of wood with the situation of that same carpenter suddenly confronted with a broken hammer (Heidegger [1927] 1962: 98–102). In the former situation, the hammer is what Heidegger would call “ready-to-hand”: it isn’t a separate entity in experience, an object for an ­experiencing subject, but simply part of the carpenter’s action, part of her “being-inthe-world” as a carpenter. It is only in the later situation, one in which her practical action is interrupted, where the hammer is “present-at-hand.” Now, the carpenter must suddenly treat the hammer as a discrete object of attention that is constituted in focused experience. This distinction is part of a much larger inquiry into the ways that the person finds herself in the world before an act of consciousness constitutes and discovers individual things. Examining our way of being-in-the-world, Heidegger argues that the mode of existence that humans have is different from that of other entities, because we are the only beings for whom the nature of our existence is a problem. Any given way of human ­being-in-the-world is thus an interpretation of being in general, and Heidegger sees individual cultures and historical periods as having distinctive modes of existence.2 Heidegger’s approach to philosophy

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during this phase of his career is often referred to as hermeneutic (i.e. interpretive), and the idea of interpretation here plays out in at least two senses: that any particular mode of human being-in-the-world is an interpretation of being in general and that philosophy is therefore necessarily an interpretation of a reality (human being) that is itself fundamentally interpretive. Emphasizing the person’s capacity to constitute the world in experience, Husserl’s philosophical approach is referred to transcendental phenomenology. In contrast, Heidegger’s emphasis on being-in-the-world and his vision of philosophy as an interpretive process have led some scholars to refer to his work as existential phenomenology or hermeneutic phenomenology. Through both their commonalities and their contrasts, Husserl and Heidegger served as the starting point for much of the work that followed in the phenomenological tradition. Though Heidegger’s explicit use of hermeneutics ended with Being and Time (see Ramberg and Gjesdal 2014), this vein of research was actively carried forward by other thinkers. In Truth and Method ([1960] 1989), for example, Hans Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) developed powerful ideas about the nature of interpretation and the problem of interpreting literary texts, while Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) made the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology speak to an array of central topics in the humanities and social sciences. In a long and productive career, Ricoeur suggested how everyday conduct could be interpreted as a text ([1986] 1991), worked to reconcile phenomenology with rival intellectual traditions (1970), and explored the problem of interpretive antagonism in social life ([1969] 2007). The most famous existential phenomenologists are Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Maurice ­Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). One of Sartre’s major concerns was with the nature of freedom, and his Being and Nothingness ([1943] 1948) used nuanced portraits of everyday interaction to shed light on issues of agency and affect. Drawing on then unpublished manuscripts by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty’s rigorous and evocative descriptions of perception illustrated the centrality of the body for every area within philosophy. His Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962) uses subtle readings of everyday life to reveal how the lived body emerges for us, by turns, as object and as subject; building on these discussions, Merleau-Ponty reveals that consciousness is necessarily—rather than contingently—embodied, and that agency and social relations can only be understood as bodily phenomena. Though Sartre’s sway over mid-century intellectual life was enormous, his influence has decreased over the years while Merleau-Ponty’s has only risen, and much of the contemporary emphasis on embodiment can be traced to the latter’s pioneering ideas. (For additional perspectives on embodiment, see Text Box 1.1.) The work of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty make it clear that phenomenology is no tradition of individualistic thought, and the social and political philosophy that has been pursued within phenomenology is highly varied. Seeking to ground Max Weber’s interpretive sociology in Husserl’s ontology, the major works of Alfred Schütz (1899–1959) develop systematic accounts of the experience of others in social interaction ([1932] 1967; Schütz and Luckmann [1973] 1975; 1983). In painstaking detail, Schütz explores the ways that meanings emerge in the temporal flux of everyday life, how they are partially shared between interlocutors, and how large-scale social structures emerge in experience. A skilled pianist, Schütz wrote extensively about music, and his article “Making Music Together” (1951), which focuses specifically on temporality in musical interactions, has become a cornerstone phenomenological ethnomusicology (see also Schütz 1976). If Schütz sought a phenomenological grounding for Weber’s liberal social theory, other thinkers in the tradition worked to forward radical politics. The ideas of Karl Marx, for example, deeply informed Sartre’s writings, and phenomenology is one of the currents of influence on the work of the celebrated post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). For example, the chapter titled “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” from Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 2008: 89–119) develops

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a powerful phenomenology of the agonies of racialized subjectivity and presents a blistering critique of Sartre’s writings on race, an approach that was carried forward in the work of later writers like Thomas F. Slaughter (1977). The Second Sex ([1949] 2010) by Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) is a foundational document in feminist theory, while phenomenologies of gendered embodiment like Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980) have been widely influential.3 In differing ways, these authors show how the categories of persons are unavoidably political and illustrate how forms of domination like empire and patriarchy shape the lived experience of persons who find themselves as raced and gendered subjects. The issue of alterity was also important for Emmanuel ­Levinas (1906–1995), but he sought to steer phenomenology in a completely new direction. Arguing that we must understand the nature of social relationships before we can make inquiries into being or knowing, Levinas’s Totality and Infinity ([1969] 1991) uses a subtle phenomenology of the face of the other in social interaction as the starting point for a vast intellectual enterprise that challenges almost every element of Western philosophy. Levinas emphasizes the open-ended nature of social interaction and the humbling experience of confronting the agency of an other who cannot be subordinated to our schemes of meaning making. In these phenomena, Levinas sees a new foundation for ethics and politics, as well as metaphysics and epistemology.4 Phenomenology has continued to develop since the 1970s, and to locate its place in the contemporary intellectual scene, we need to situate it in the context of opposing intellectual movements. And to do that, we need to backtrack a bit. In the first half of the twentieth century, phenomenology was arguably the dominant tradition of philosophy in continental Europe, but the second half of the twentieth century saw it face sharp challenges, many of which emerged within the French academy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966), for example, focused scholarly attention away from the description of lived experience and toward the analysis of cultural texts, which were seen as the product of underlying structures of mind. (On structuralism, see Beaster-Jones [this volume].) The 1960s saw the first publications or rise to great prominence of a diverse and complex set of radical thinkers within and beyond philosophy—for example, Michel Foucault ([1966] 1989, 1984), Jacques ­Derrida ([1967] 1973, [1967] 1997), and Jacques Lacan ([1966] 1996)—whose highly influential work has been referred to, starting in the 1980s, as “post-­structuralism” or, more vaguely and with decreasing frequency, as “French Theory.” Contemporary ­scholars have a range of viewpoints about whether these thinkers constitute a unified intellectual movement. The philosopher Judith Butler, for example, has argued that “French ­T heory” was ­something of an American invention ([1990] 1999:  x), as these thinkers were not always seen in their home country as creating a unified ­movement, and the differences among them could be substantial. However, other scholars—a ­m ajority in the contemporary scene—have emphasized the continuities in their work. 5 Despite these conflicting readings of intellectual history, we can say with clarity that the mid-century French radical thinkers rejected or highly modified phenomenology’s focus on lived experience and its understanding of the subject as the crucial source of meaning. For them, it was fruitless to search for universal features of the subject, which they felt was always situated in particular historical and social conditions. This opposition to phenomenology was married to a wide range of perspectives and agendas—the view that text, culture, or power constitutes the subject; a skepticism about grand historical narratives and the philosophical quest for securing the foundations of rationality, ethics, or knowledge; and a concern for forms of domination beyond economic exploitation. (On post-structuralism, see Sugarman [this volume].) To more fully map out the contemporary intellectual terrain, we need to identify a second cleavage, one that is far less controversial. The primary division in North American

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philosophy departments today is between Continental philosophy (which includes both phenomenology and post-structuralism) and analytic philosophy, an intellectual movement stemming from the work of philosophers Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig ­Wittgenstein (see Text Box 1.2). The later tradition emphasizes the rigorous analysis of language in ­addressing philosophical questions, largely develops liberal or conservative ­approaches to political theory (rather than, for example, Marxist ones), and allies closely with ­contemporary advances in logic and with the natural sciences. Analytic philosophy is by far the dominant tradition within American philosophy departments, while Continental thinkers like Foucault and Lacan are highly influential in other humanities fields, particularly those related to literary studies. The position of phenomenology—and phenomenological ethnomusicology—in all of this is complex. Despite the dominance of the analytic tradition, phenomenology remains an active movement within philosophy proper. From folklore to film studies and beyond, phenomenological approaches have been used in a wide range of humanities disciplines outside of philosophy (Embree 1996: 1), as well as in the humanistic social sciences like portions of cultural anthropology and sociology (Desjarlais and Throop 2011; Katz and Csordas 2003). And while the line between analytic and Continental philosophy is not frequently breached in today’s philosophy departments, ideas from phenomenology have had complex interactions with those from other traditions and disciplines. Heidegger, for example, was a crucial influence on Foucault (see Dreyfus 1991: 9), while Derrida, who was steeped in Husserl, can be seen variously as phenomenology’s fiercest critique or its most creative exponent. With its emphasis on lived experience and social practice, phenomenology has had a powerful influence on a number of ethnomusicologists. Set in the broadest perspective, this should come as no surprise. As Ruth Stone has observed (2008: 169), the late nineteenth century saw links between the predecessors of phenomenology and the discipline that developed into ethnomusicology, comparative musicology. What will occupy our attention now is the creative ways that ethnomusicologists have taken up ideas from the philosophical tradition and carried them forward in new directions.

Phenomenology in Ethnomusicology The first use of phenomenology in ethnomusicology came with Stone’s publications in the early 1980s (Stone and Stone 1981; Stone [1982] 2010). Her 1982 book, Let the Inside Be Sweet, is equally an ethnography of the Woi epic of the Kpelle people of Liberia and a program for phenomenological ethnomusicology. In contrast to older approaches in ethnomusicology, which focused on musical works, repertoires, or music cultures, Stone takes the performance event as her study object and offers a detailed framework for understanding how such events are built up from the interactions of their participants. To theorize these events, Stone draws on Schütz’s “Making Music Together” (1951), in which he argues that for performance to be involving, musicians and listeners must have a shared experience of the way that the music is unfolding over time. Equally important for her is Schütz’s broad vision of social life (e.g. Schütz and Luckmann [1973] 1975) and the closely allied tradition of symbolic interactionism in sociology (e.g. Blumer 1969), which richly explore the dynamics of face-to-face conduct. Schütz’s work was based on his immersion in the culture of Western art music, where performers typically played pre-composed works for their audiences, but more important for Stone’s vision were the perspectives of her Kpelle interlocutors. For them, music performance wasn’t the presentation or appreciation of a pre-existing composition but rather an interactive process of co-constituting an event. Stone’s work shows how Kpelle performers and audience members engage in the multisensory exchange of symbols to coordinate and form meaningful experience. Stone does not

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merely emphasize musical activity over decontextualized musical texts; rather, she shows how, from a Kpelle perspective, pre-composed musical elements are primarily experienced as a medium for the unfolding of interactions and events, and Let the Inside Be Sweet builds from this idea to a broader event-oriented theoretical framework for ethnomusicology.6 Developing this theme, marking and cuing hold a central place in the book. Stone offers detailed accounts of the way that performers and their audiences process around an open area in their village to delineate the performance space, signal the beginning or ending of a performance through verbal formulae and other devices, and move from one section of the epic to another by exchanging musical cues. Initially, it may appear that marking and cuing are nothing more than pragmatic activities that allow the participants to coordinate their behavior, activities that are merely ancillary to the music itself. As Stone’s discussion develops, though, it becomes clear that no such division exists: the exchange of cues itself is the focus of musical aesthetics. From the smallest negotiation of tempo and timbre, through the weaving of interlocking polyrhythmic patterns among the drummers, to passages of call and response at the level of the phrase, every element of the music is an exchange of symbols by which the participants make the event meaningful in their experience together. Culture plays a central role in Stone’s work, as she shows how the exchange of symbols in performance are intimately connected to social context and must be understood from the participant’s perspective. In the most ambitious construction of its philosophical tradition, phenomenology reveals how the subject constitutes the world in experience, and the application of phenomenology’s methods to individual domains of social life (e.g. music, literature, film, social interaction) would, it was hoped, reveal structures unique to each domain. Stone’s phenomenological ethnomusicology finds subjects constituting experience, but they are profoundly cultural subjects, deeply informed by the social worlds in which they are embedded and constituting “music” in ways that Schütz could not have foreseen. While clearly grounded in Schütz’s ideas, Stone reveals dynamics of musical experience that transcend anything suggested in his work. The emphasis on meaning making in interaction plays out in a different way by ethnomusicologists influenced more by the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. For example, Powerhouse for God (1988), Jeff Todd Titon’s classic ethnography of an Appalachian Baptist congregation, sets the hymn singing of their worship services in the context of a wide range of other performance events and genres, such as religious instruction in Sunday school and the telling of life story narratives. In a distinctively ­R icoeurian move, Titon understands everything from hymnody and sermon to personal experience narrative and everyday situations as texts to be interpreted. In this context, Titon’s study object is interpretive processes writ broad—the distinctive way that people in this community have of making social life meaningful by reference to the fundamental beliefs of their culture. The result is an intimate and three-dimensional portrait of a group of people and their world, one that illustrates hermeneutic processes in musical practice and everyday activities that go beyond the dynamics identified in the philosophical literature. Closely linked to Titon’s work is that of Timothy Rice, whose highly influential research on Bulgarian folk traditions (1994) and issues of theory and method in ethnomusicology (e.g. 2008, 2017) draws on a related set of philosophical sources. In hermeneutics, Rice sees a way of overcoming the polarization of insider and outsider to which ethnomusicology’s traditional emphasis on “local perspectives” can lead. While the ethnographer and her research participants often have very different pasts, they share a similar interpretive predicament. Confronted with the major texts and most resonant practices of a culture, both insiders and outsiders begin with immediate, pre-reflexive understandings, go through a process of active analysis and interpretation, and ultimately find themselves transformed by the process of making these works and practices meaningful. For Rice, ethnography is therefore less an

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attempt to get into the heads of one’s research participants than it is the process of allowing oneself to be transformed by the same set of powerful cultural landmarks that have shaped their lives. Rice’s richest illustration of these ideas comes in his discussion of learning to play Bulgarian bagpipes. Early in his fieldwork, lessons from established musicians gave Rice a steady, incremental improvement in his performance skills. Eventually, however, he reached a plateau and was incapable of mastering a set of melodic ornaments that are iconic of the local culture—ones that could not be explicitly explained by his teachers. Only a period of intensive listening and embodied practice allowed Rice to internalize the technique and acquire the style seen by its adherents as central to the tradition. In his Ricoeurian reading, Rice’s journey was not so much one of moving from insider to outsider as it was of moving closer to the tradition, its works, and its practices, and allowing himself to be transformed by it. Phenomenology has been used to explore a wide range of issues in ethnomusicology. ­Steven Friedson’s ethnographic work in Malawi (1996) and Ghana (2009), for example, draws on Heidegger’s thought to develop powerful insights into the musical experiences that emerge in healing and trance rituals. The nature of time is a perennial concern of both philosophers and musicians, so it is no surprise that this topic has interested phenomenological ethnomusicologists as well. From Stone’s work on the Kpelle concept of “expandable moments” (1988), to Friedson’s ideas about the perception of multi-stable rhythms in Tumbuka ceremonies (1996), to Roger Savage’s cross-cultural examination of the way that intense musical experiences create a kind of time out of time (2010), Andy McGuiness’s Sartrean insights into the temporal dynamics of shame in British indie rock performance (2013), and my own work on temporality and tonality (1999) or affect (2010), phenomenological ethnomusicologists have shown that people have a level of control over the way that music unfolds in their experience and that this unfolding is profoundly shaped by culture. While Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time-­Consciousness ([1929] 1964) is the seed from which much of this work has grown, these authors have discovered forms of temporality in experience—and the meanings of such forms—that had not been previously identified in the scholarly literature. The role of the body in music has also received much attention by scholars in phenomenological ethnomusicology. Matthew Rahaim’s work, for example, uses ethnographic techniques to explore the significance of gesture in North Indian classical singing (2012). Drawing on ideas from Merleau-Ponty, Rahaim understands melody, not as abstract form or purely sonic structure, but as a kind of motion, one that may have its most vivid life in sound but that is also expressed through physical gesture. As minds that are inherently embodied, we know the phenomenon of motion by being bodies that move through the lived spaces of the world. It should be no surprise, therefore, that song and bodily motion are often married together, and Rahaim shows the culturally specific ways in which ­H industani vocalists articulate melody through means that are both sonic and kinesic, making music not just with the vocal tract, but with the entire body. These examples only scratch the ­surface of the diverse phenomenological work done by ethnomusicologists. From the intercultural dimensions of performance (Bakan 1999), to music and memory (Conn 2012), time and media technologies (Porcello 1998), and beyond, scholars in our field have used ideas from phenomenology to explore a wide range of topics and develop a unique set of insights into social life and culture. (See Berger [2015] for a further discussion of the literature in phenomenological ethnomusicology.)

Phenomenology in the Field: Northeast Ohio, 1992 Phenomenology has been central to all of my research, and my first major fieldwork project was conducted in the early 1990s in four music scenes in Northeast, Ohio. In Cleveland,

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I worked with a group of young, European American musicians that played commercial hard rock and dreamed of international stardom on the model of bands like Poison or Whitesnake. There, I also conducted field research with a group of African ­A merican jazz musicians in their thirties and older who played contemporary post-bop jazz. In ­A kron, I worked with young white musicians in a heavy metal scene that found its center of gravity in death metal—an aggressive, commercially marginal style characterized by elaborate song forms and vocals delivered in a broad range of raspy timbres. I also talked with a group of white Akron jazz musicians, largely in their forties and older, who played accessible jazz in a style associated with the 1950s. The musicians in all four scenes were predominantly men. One of the main goals of my initial Ohio fieldwork was to get a concrete and detailed understanding of the musicians’ experiences in performance and rehearsal. What is it like to stand on the stage at a big rock club in Cleveland or sit in an intimate jazz bar in Akron? To work out arrangements in a rehearsal space or take lessons with a teacher? More than a strictly descriptive or interpretive project, I also wanted to develop more general insights into how musical experiences are formed. Are such experiences largely personal and idiosyncratic, or can we find patterns in the performers’ awareness of their events? What roles do culture and power play in all of this? And what of the musicians’ agency, their ability to shape and direct experience? To answer these questions, I started with one of the basic structure of experience that phenomenology has uncovered, that of focus, fringe, and horizon (see Ihde 1976). There is almost no part of our lives in which phenomena appear to us as isolated entities. Instead, we find ourselves confronted with a field of phenomena, and our attention to that field is graded. Things in the focus of our attention are given with the greatest intensity and detail; those in the background appear to us in a muted fashion, and the background of the field trails off into a horizon, beyond which we have no immediate awareness. A cursory exploration of this focus/fringe/horizon structure reveals that, while phenomena in the background are given with less strength and clarity than those in the focus, they often color the way one experiences foregrounded phenomena. A dull pain in the background of my experience or the half-acknowledged anticipation of a happy event to come will cast an affective shadow on the phenomena in the focus, much in the same way that a bass line in the background of a musical texture will frame the harmonic qualities of the melody in its foreground, shaping and informing the sense of tonal center that we hear in the tune. The horizon may seem like little more than a limit or void, but it plays a critical role in the field of experience: not merely the trailing edge of awareness, the horizon points toward a world beyond what is immediately present for us. Walking down the street, for example, I don’t see the visual horizon as the end of the universe but as the edge of my current experience—a place within my awareness that offers the possibilities of future phenomena that might eventually appear in the focus or fringe. The example of walking down a street brings up two other noteworthy experiential processes. First, experience is dynamic, with phenomena constantly moving between focus and fringe. Indeed, in any given situation the rhythm of our experience—the manner in which phenomena emerge, reappear, and pass away for us—is one of the primary things that gives that situation its character. Second, the organization of experience is highly pragmatic. Only the most adept meditator may have complete control over her experience, but in everyday life we constantly organize our attention. When we read, for example, the words on the page and our own responses to them constantly shift between focus and near fringe, while phenomena like the growling of a hungry stomach or the chatter from the office next

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door trail off toward the horizon, keeping us tuned into our body and environment without distracting us from our literary task. If employed as a crude checklist, the intellectual apparatus from any theoretical tradition can reduce the complexities of the field to a mere caricature, but treated as a way of understanding people’s lives, ideas from theory profoundly deepen and enrich participantobservation fieldwork and ethnographic interviews. Using the notions of focus, fringe, and horizon as a starting point, I sat down with musicians and asked them about their experiences in different musical settings. I also attended as many performances and rehearsals as I could, watching and listening to the crowd and the musicians to get a sense of the elements of the event to which they might be paying attention. While some musicians were initially reluctant to talk about their experiences, most were eager to discuss them, and my fieldwork confirmed something I long expected: musicians are masters of attention. Whether a performer is coordinating sixteenth notes on the double kick drums with the bass player’s pounding ostinato, cutting the changes in “Giant Steps,” nailing the high harmony part in a rock song when he can’t hear the lead vocal in his monitor, or finding an improvised line on the vibes when an overbearing accompanist insists on playing voicings with too many notes, the working musician has an extraordinary ability to organize attention.7 Some commonalities could be found across my interviews. All of the musicians said that, in an ideal performance, they would be deeply involved in the music, experiencing the event as a smooth and unbroken flow of emotionally laden sounds. Likewise, all agreed that if there was a problem in any of the fundamental elements of the music, like the coordination of tempo, they would focus their attention there to resolve the issue. Getting deeper into the topic, patterns unique to each music scene began to emerge. For example, each kind of ensemble had typical patterns of reciprocity and circulation of attention, with jazz drummers and bass players holding each other’s parts in the center of their experience to secure a steady but flowing groove, and accompanying pianists and soloists listening carefully to the harmonic implications of each other’s parts to avoid conflicts. Both metal and rock musicians explained that the sound systems in most local clubs were so bad that it was often quite difficult to hear one’s own part or that of the other musicians. In such a situation, one would imagine the other player’s parts in one’s head to keep one’s place in the structure of the song and, if at all possible, follow the drummer’s tempo to maintain rhythmic ­coordination. The musician’s attention to the audience differed greatly between the jazz and rock scenes. Rock musicians spoke of trying to compel the audience’s attention with their performance. While the jazz players said that they appreciated an attentive crowd, there was no way that they could compel the listener’s attention with their music, they said; the most that they could do was invite the audience’s attention and hope the crowd would take up their musical offer. The patterns in the data that were most suggestive had to do with the place that thought in ­ kron words or other forms of abstract cogitation had for musicians in performance. For the A jazz musicians, as well as both the commercial hard rockers and the metalheads, abstract thought on stage was used strictly to solve problems. If the drummer kept rushing, if a singer was concerned that he couldn’t hit the high note in a phrase, if the pianist kept using an unfamiliar chord substitution, the bass player, singer, or soloist might slightly displace the flow of sound from the center of his experience and devote some attention to actively planning a course of action that would solve the problem. If possible, though, such periods would be brief, and the ideal gig had the sound of music and its affective qualities in the center of attention, while the body’s unproblematic performance and the audience’s supportive attention and energy lingered in the near background, giving the event energy and momentum. Such a texture of experience was desirable for the younger African American jazz musicians in

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Cleveland, but they saw thinking in words as having the potential to be something more than a problem solving tool. In contrast to the musicians from the other scenes, they spoke positively of performances in which an effortless current of music sound and bodily performance was simultaneously accompanied by an effortless current of thought in words or other forms of plotting and planning. Thinking should never compromise performance and overly clever musical techniques weren’t desirable, they said, but they didn’t see purely sonic experience as the only standard by which a performance was judged. Exploring patterns in my research participants’ experiences allowed me to speak to key issues in the study of expressive culture. For example, a wide range of scholars celebrate the power of performance to generate intense, even euphoric experiences of involvement, what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has referred to as “flow states” (e.g. [1975] 2000; Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi 1988). In some contexts, talk about musical involvement can take on a romantic quality, naively celebrating bodily engagement with others and representing thought as something that does nothing more than separate the person from others and erase the joy of music participation. Taking a phenomenological approach to musical experience allowed me to see the differing ways that reflexive thought in words can be constituted and valued in music cultures. We make music for a wide range of reasons and in a wide range of ways, and a-reflexive involvement in the flow of sound is only one mode of musical experience that people may find valuable. (See Rahaim’s chapter in this volume for a broader discussion of musical involvement and theories of participation.) These patterns also show that something as intimate and seemingly idiosyncratic as the organization of attention is shaped by larger social forces. The jazz musicians that I worked  with in Cleveland saw jazz as an African American art music, an intellectually sophisticated form of expression that has flourished despite the racism that has consistently marginalized people of color in the United States; their practices of organizing attention, which fostered self-reflexive thought in words along with experiences of affectively laden sound, were directly tied to these ideologies and their larger political contexts. Connections between situated experience and large-scale social forces were everywhere in my fieldwork, and using ideas from phenomenology helped me to understand these complex relationships. For example, a good part of my project examined how experiences of harmony and rhythm in death metal depended on particular ways of organizing attention, and how these practices, in turn, were tied to the contexts of deindustrialization and working-class rage. It is not merely the case that larger social forces shape experience. In the book that came from that fieldwork (1999) and in later publications (2010), I suggested how perceptual practices are linked with wider currents of musical activity, and how the practices that take place in the domain of expressive culture have the potential to impinge back on other spheres of social life and macro-social orders. Set in the broadest perspective, this kind of work allowed me to understand the profound ways in which the person’s lived experiences of music are always social experiences. Far from mental phenomena “in my head,” one’s musical experiences are oriented toward and influenced by the experiences of others in our immediate situation and are shaped by—and have the potential to impact upon—the widest currents of social and political life. In one sense, then, my fieldwork in Ohio reaffirmed the oldest and most traditional element of the phenomenological vision—that the person engages with the world and makes it meaningful. But in another sense, it connects more directly with later phenomenological work and other recent forms of social theory by showing how the meanings that the person makes are unavoidably connected with larger social forces and relations of power. Rather than fleshing out universal structures of subjectivity, this kind of work sees the subject as fundamentally situated in particular historical and social conditions. Taking lived experience as my study object, I found that phenomenology gave

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me tools for more effectively pursuing ethnomusicology’s interpretive project of understanding the experiences of the people I worked with, and it also allowed me to open that interpretive project onto larger political arenas. *** The topics that I have discussed in this chapter are diverse—the dynamics of performance events, the problem of time in music, the nature of musical embodiment, and the organization of attention—but they do not begin to exhaust the potential of phenomenological work in ethnomusicology. For example, with the publication of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenologies (2006), critical phenomenological approaches to gender and sexuality have received wide attention in recent years, but relatively few ethnomusicologists have picked up this highly important area of research. Stephen Amico’s important book Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality (2014) is a key exception, and more work is needed on this topic. Building on Fanon’s ideas, Ahmed also points to the utility of phenomenology for critical research on race/ethnicity, particularly in the context of institutions (2007), and the opportunities for ethnomusicologists to forward this line of research are substantial. Drawing on a slightly different body of work, Daniel Fisher’s research with Indigenous youth in Australia has shown how phenomenology can shed new light on the paradoxes of post-colonial identity that emerge in the context of the mass media, cultural organizations, and policy (2015). These developments point the way to even broader vistas. While much phenomenological research is focused on face-to-face interaction, it need not do so. My recent work with Giovanna Del Negro on the role of expressive culture in the constitution of organizations has primarily been elaborated in terms of practice theory (2016); however, the deepest roots of that project come from phenomenology, and our current work seeks to make the phenomenological dimensions of this perspective explicit. What these lines of scholarship illustrate is the relevance of phenomenology for the full breath of topics in social and cultural life. Providing powerful ways of understanding lived experience, serving as a foundation for interpretive ethnography, and suggesting new approaches to critical research, ideas from the phenomenological movement—both within and beyond ethnomusicology— will continue to offer the potential for powerful new insights for years to come.

Notes 1 For Husserl, particularly toward the end of his life, this was not a narrowly technical exercise in epistemology. Though he converted to Lutheranism as an adult, Husserl was born Jewish. Pursuing his philosophical career in German, he experienced Nazi anti-Semitism directly and saw the rise of fascism in the 1930s as part of a larger cultural rejection of rationality in Europe, one that had deep philosophical roots (see Carr 1970: xxvii). Begun in 1934 and still incomplete at the time of his death in 1938, his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Husserl 1970), speaks to these issues. 2 It would be difficult to discuss Heidegger’s thought without mentioning his relationship to Nazism. In 1933, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, which required him to make public expressions of allegiance to the Nazi Party. Scholars have long argued about Heidegger’s connection to the Third Reich, asking if he actively supported, passively went along with, or covertly resisted Nazism, and what, if any, impact all of this had on his philosophy. These questions became more painful in 2014 with the first publication of his “black notebooks,” a series of handwritten journals that Heidegger kept in the 1930s (English translation, 2016). Not only do these writings evince a virulent anti-Semitism, but they also suggest that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was tightly bound up with his philosophical ideas. At the time of this publication, Heidegger scholars are actively working through the implications of these revelations (e.g. Farin and Malpas 2016; Mitchell and Trawny 2017). 3 For more on Fanon, see the chapters by Mahon (this volume) and Wallach and Clinton (this volume). On Marxism and feminism in ethnomusicology, see the chapters in this volume by Manuel and ­Sugarman, respectively, and Text Box 2.2.

216  Harris M. Berger 4 For a rich discussion of the relevance of Levinas’s ideas about alterity for ethnomusicology, see R ­ ahaim (2017). On Levinas and participation, see Rahaim (this volume). 5 On Derrida’s and Lacan’s ideas about voice, see Meizel and Daughtry (this volume). 6 As a faculty member in the Institutes of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Stone had a close relationship with performance theory in folklore studies. On folklore and performance, see Text Box 6.1. 7 Of course, our control of experience is never complete. J. Martin Daughtry’s crucial work on sound and listening in the Iraq War richly reveals the ways in which our experience as auditors is shaped by the unique sonic and social situation in which we find ourselves (see Daughtry 2015; Meizel and Daughtry, this volume).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8 (2): 149–68. Amico, Stephen. 2014. Roll Over, Tchaikovsky! Russian Popular Music and Post-Soviet Homosexuality. ­Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bakan, Michael B. 1999. Music of Death and New Creation: Experiences in the World of Balinese Gamelan ­B eleganjur. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949) 2010. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila ­Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Berger, Harris M. 1999. Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience. ­Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2010. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Music/ Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2015. “Phenomenological Approaches in the History of Ethnomusicology.” Oxford Handbooks Online. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.001.0001/oxfordhb9780199935321-e-30. Berger, Harris M., and Giovanna P. Del Negro. 2016. “Reasonable Suspicion: Folklore, Practice, and the Reproduction of Institutions.” Cultural Analysis 15 (1): 145–67. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Butler, Judith. (1990) 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 10th Anniversary ­Edition. New York: Routledge. Carr, David. 1970. “Translator’s Introduction.” In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, by Edmund Husserl, xv–xlii. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Conn, Stephanie. 2012. “Fitting between Present and Past: Memory and Social Interaction in Cape ­Breton Gaelic Singing.” Ethnomusicology Forum 21 (3): 354–73. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1975) 2000. Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, eds. 1988. Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daughtry, J. Martin. 2015. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1973. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1967) 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Desjarlais, Robert, and C. Jason Throop. 2011. “Phenomenological Approaches in Anthropology.” ­Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (1): 87–102. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Embree, Lester. 1996. “Introduction.” In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, edited by Lester Embree, 1–10. Boston: Springer. Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Phenomenological Approaches  217 Farin, Ingo, and Jeff Malpas, eds. 2016. Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Fisher, Daniel. 2015. “Experiencing Self-Abstraction: Studio Production and Vocal Consciousness.” In Phenomenology in Anthropology: A Sense of Perspective, edited by Kalpana Ram and Christopher Houston, 153–74. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. (1966) 1989. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Friedson, Steven M. 1996. Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2009. Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1960) 1989. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Continuum. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ———. 2016. Ponderings II-IV: Black Notebooks 1931–1938. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. ­Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. (1900–1901) 2001. Logical Investigations. Edited by Dermot Moran. Translated by J.N. Findlay. New York: Routledge. ———. (1913) 1962. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by William Ralph Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books. ———. (1926) 2001. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. ­Translated by Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. ———. (1929) 1964. Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Edited by Martin Heidegger. T ­ ranslated by James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1931) 1960. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorian Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Translated by David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ihde, Don. 1976. Listening and Voice. Athens: Ohio University Press. Ingarden, Roman. (1933) 1989. The Ontology of the Work of Art: The Musical Work, The Picture, The Architectural Work, The Film. Translated by Raymond Meyer and John T. Goldthwait. Athens: Ohio University Press. Katz, Jack, and Thomas J. Csordas. 2003. “Phenomenological Ethnography in Sociology and Anthropology.” Ethnography 4 (3): 275–88. Lacan, Jacques. (1966) 1996. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1962) 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. (1969) 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Rev. ed. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. McGuiness, Andy. 2013. “Self-Consciousness in Music Performance.” In Experience and Meaning in Music Performance, edited by Martin Clayton, Byron Dueck, and Laura Leante, 108–34. New York: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1945) 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Humanities Press. Mitchell, Andrew J. and Peter Trawny, ed. 2017. Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism. New York: Columbia University Press. Porcello, Thomas. 1998. “‘Tails out’: Social Phenomenology and the Ethnographic Representation of Technology in Music-Making.” Ethnomusicology 42 (3): 485–510. Rahaim, Matthew. 2012. Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music. Music/Culture Book Series. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2017. “Otherwise than Participation: Unity and Alterity in Musical Encounters.” In Music and Empathy, edited by Elaine King and Caroline Waddington, 175–93. London: Taylor and Francis. Ramberg, Bjørn, and Kristin Gjesdal. 2014. “Hermeneutics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/ hermeneutics/.

218  Harris M. Berger Rice, Timothy. 1994. May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. “Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and Field Experience in Ethnomusicology.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory Barz and ­Timothy J. Cooley, 2nd ed., 42–62. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Modeling Ethnomusicology. New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. (1969) 2007. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Edited by Don Ihde. ­Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Dennis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. (1986) 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1943) 1948. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. Savage, Roger W. H. 2010. Hermeneutics and Music Criticism. New York: Routledge. Schütz, Alfred. (1932) 1967. Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by George Walsh and Fredrick Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1951. “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship.” Social Research 18 (1): 76–97. ———. 1976. “Fragments on the Phenomenology of Music.” Music and Man 2 (1–2): 5–72. ­ ichard Schütz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. (1973) 1975. The Structures of the Life-World. Translated by R M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Vol. 1. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1983. The Structures of the Life-World. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent. Vol. 2. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Slaughter, Thomas F. 1977. “Epidermalizing the World: A Basic Mode of Being-Black.” Man and World 10: 303–8. Smith, David Woodruff. 2013. “Phenomenology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2013. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/phenomenology/. Stein, Edith. (1917) 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. 3rd rev. ed. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Discalced Carmelite. Vol. 3. Washington, DC: ICS Publications. Steinbock, Anthony J. 2001. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, by Edmund Husserl, xv–lxvii. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Stone, Ruth M. (1982) 2010. Let the Inside Be Sweet: The Interpretation of Music Event among the Kpelle of Liberia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Trickster Press. ———. 1988. Dried Millet Breaking: Time, Words, and Song in the Woi Epic of the Kpelle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. Theory for Ethnomusicology. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Stone, Ruth M., and Verlon L. Stone. 1981. “Event, Feedback, and Analysis: Research Media in the Study of Music Events.” Ethnomusicology 25 (2): 215–25. Titon, Jeff Todd. 1988. Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church. Austin: University of Texas Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3 (2): 137–56.

9 Theories of Participation Matthew Rahaim

We are surrounded by forms of collective musical action undertaken entirely for the sake of those who join in, and which produce distinctive forms of collective sociality (a band, a party, a choir, a dance floor). We are invited (if we are invited at all) to get into it, to join in, to be in a groove, and this inside offers powers, pleasures, and dangers not available to those on the outside. While a piece of music may be studied at some distance by an observing subject, participation requires becoming part of something. It thus seems to blur the lines between knower and known. The rhythmic patterns and social structures that yielded their secrets a moment ago, the description of which could have fit on a single piece of paper, now fade from attention. Upon joining in, something quite different comes into view: a groove, a circle, a living, moving, musicking entity of which any individual is only a part. Because of these distinctive ontological possibilities, participation has long been regarded as a very particular sort of method, a mode of comportment that sacrifices critical distance in order to reveal a social collectivity larger than any one observer. ­Generations of ethnographers have attempted to tack methodologically between participation and observation in order to describe the power of collective performance. The participatory worlds that emerge, and their apparently incontrovertible truths, can be overwhelmingly seductive. Especially against a background suspicion about individualist humanism and scientific detachment, descriptions of group participation often ring out in tones of breathless celebration, extolling the pleasures of sharing, belonging, moral conviction, and metaphysical oneness. Collective performance is nothing new, and the metaphysics of participation has been a source of philosophical controversy since Parmenides. But it wasn’t until the twentieth century, in the midst of fervent nationalisms and anxieties about social disintegration, that advocates of participation (from anthropologists to theater directors, from music educators to theologians to political organizers) have argued zealously that we ought to participate—not just because it feels good, but because it appears to be “essential to our well-being as individuals and social creatures” (Ede 1997: 6). Others have argued that the pleasures and solidarities of participation can pose distinct dangers: mobs, for example, animated by a concerted totalitarian will, drunk with conviction, are often vehicles for political violence against outsiders (Adorno [1941] 2002; Levinas [1991] 1998; Turino 2008: 205). Much of the debate about the politics of participatory performance hinges on how to characterize the emergent socialities that it produces: as fascistic or radically democratic, as childishly regressive or politically progressive. The purpose of this chapter is not to make a moralizing case either for or against participation in general but to map out the terrain of the debates, trace out key philosophical lineages, and suggest some paths for deeper readings.1

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Participation: The Philosophical Tradition The ethnomusicological sense of participation refers both to a practical musical relation of absorbed interaction and to a metaphysical relation by which apparently separate beings inhere in a prior unity. This double meaning is implicit in the Greek philosophical term methexis (translated into Latin as participatio, and thence to English).2 Methexis referred both to a mode of ritual theatrical performance in which audience members join in and to a metaphysical relation by which apparently separate phenomenal particulars participate in a prior universal form. In the Platonic tradition, methexis is the key metaphysical term that draws a transcendent form together vertically with its worldly particulars and draws together a group of apparently separate particulars into a horizontal unity. One canonical Platonic image of methexis is a single sun that illuminates many things with one light; another is a single cloth laid over a group of people, making a unity out of many individuals. 3 In the Christian tradition, two well-known images for methexis are a single body with many limbs and the ritual partaking of Christ’s flesh through communion.4 Through exegetic commentary, methexis became a key metaphysical resource for Christian theological construals of spiritual unity and relational ontology, and this concept entered the Islamicate philosophical tradition through Arabic-language translations of Aristotle, Porphyry, and Proclus.5 Methexis is often contrasted with mimesis, a process of imitative (but never identical) re-presentation. While a mimetic copy always maintains its metaphysical distance from the original (as a movie star might “fall in love” again and again in successive films without actually falling in love), methetic participation is always bound up in immediate unity (as particular lovers participate in Love itself ). The opposition between these two terms has been presented in various ways,6 but from neoplatonic mysticism to Catholic theology to performance studies to groovology, participation nearly always serves as the favored term in a binary, in contrast to a mimetic opposite: presence vs. re-presentation, unity vs. duality, sincerity vs. duplicity, bodily involvement vs. reflective distance, live music vs. recording. The revival of scholarly interest in participation in the twentieth century was enabled by the sociology of Emile Durkheim (1858–1919), founded on a vision of vast, coherent, supra-individual social forces.7 In particular, Durkheim’s account of “collective effervescence” (transformative ritual moments in which a group of people becomes united) influenced nearly every later theorist of participation: Once the individuals are gathered together, a sort of electricity is generated from their closeness and quickly launches them to an extraordinary height of exaltation… [B]ecause a collective emotion cannot be expressed collectively without some order that permits harmony and unison of movement, these gestures and cries tend to fall into rhythm and regularity, and from there into songs and dances. ([1912] 1995: 220) Note that here, participation in a pre-given social totality generates rhythmic regularity; in ethnomusicological construals, it is usually the other way round. The specific turn to participation as a philosophical theme is largely due to Lucien ­Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), a philosopher and avid follower of comparative metaphysics who was deeply influenced by Durkheimian social theory and fascinated by missionary accounts of failed conversions. Lévy-Bruhl projected the methexis/mimesis binary onto a pair of distinctive mentalités: a “primitive” mentality characteristic of indigenous peoples and a “civilized” mentality characteristic of the European colonizers who (much to their own surprise) often failed to convert them.8 Lévy-Bruhl claimed that these unconvertible “primitives”

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were not, as many European commentators had long assumed, racially deficient; they simply had a different mentality, one founded on participation. By participation, “the one and the many, the same and the other” were bound together in a “mystic community of substance.” Whereas for a “civilized” mentality, an individual may represent a group, a participatory understanding maintains “actual identity” between one and many without any sense of logical contradiction (1926: 77). Lévy-Bruhl’s work was met with near-unanimous criticism from anthropologists—partly for his uncritical acceptance of missionary accounts and partly for his racialist generalizations about so-called primitives.9 He later renounced the idea of a distinctive “primitive mentality” in favor of the idea that participation was “available in every human mind” ([1938] 1975: 100–101). Lévy-Bruhl’s vision of participation as a universal human capability became central to the work of his most forceful exponent, metaphysical literary theorist Owen Barfield (1898–1997). Inspired by the anthroposophical mysticism of Rudolf Steiner, Barfield offered a critique of alienated modern “idolatry,” in which objects are taken to have an independent reality apart from their perceivers (58), and prophesied a coming new age of “final” participatory awareness, in which the world would appear in its luminous participatory metaphysical aspect (1965: 133). Crucially, this was a matter of ethical refinement for Barfield; he insisted that the practices that enable final participation require not just “hypothetical thinking,” but active “thought, feeling, will, and character” (141). The idea that participation is a cultivated way of being that remedies modern alienation was at the foundation of later ethnomusicological construals of participation, such as Charles Keil’s activist writings (discussed below).10

Participation: The Political Tradition Treatises on statecraft, war, and liturgy have long recognized the small-scale, local solidarities produced by singing and moving together,11 but participatory music making appears to have arisen as an explicit model for large-scale, socially cohesive political formations with particular force in the age of nationalism. From the French Revolution to Indian anti-colonial nationalism to the Industrial Workers of the World, participatory singing (on the scale of dozens of people) cultivated a vivid sense of vast, unprecedented macrosocial solidarities (on the scale of millions).12 In interwar Germany, the ideal of Gebrauchsmusik (participatory music for useful purposes) animated both communist and Nazi populisms, elevating the communal vitality of everyday song and dance over the “decay” of bourgeois high art (Eisler in Pritchard 2012: 35; Shirer in Turino 2008: 207). German musicologist Heinrich Besseler was an early advocate of participatory music as a method of forging a national community. He celebrated simple participatory pieces for singing and dancing in glowing, Heideggerian terms: we engage in everyday singing and dancing “with personal commitment,” he believed, in contrast to the contemplation of “high art” music, which occurs at a distance through a special “aesthetic attitude” ([1959] 2012: 60). But after World War II, the taint of Nazi ideology—and Besseler’s own enthusiastic participation in the Nazi party—largely discredited the concept of Gebrauchsmusik (Hinton [2001] 2014). The vision of a participatory politics grounded in participatory performance, however, was given new life in the postwar American counterculture. The civil rights movement repurposed traditions of African American song performance for building solidarities of resistance (Turino 2008: 215). The forms of political theater practiced by Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) and other experimental writers and theater directors invited audiences into “ceremonial communion” with the performers, fusing a loose communitarian politics of solidarity with a metaphysics of unity (Azouz 2015; Bishop 2012). The New Left of the 1960s, repelled by the totalitarian horrors of Stalinism, looked to spontaneous, non-hierarchical

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forms of improvised participation for a political model. Informed by these traditions, a distinctly improvisational set of political practices emerged among recent anti-war and ­anti-globalization activists, visible in forms of “direct” participatory performance (such as street theater and the various “occupations” of the Occupy movement) that seem to present an alternative to the failings of “indirect” politics (i.e. merely voting for representatives) that mirrors in politics the metaphysical distinction between methexis and mimesis.13

Participation: The Ethnomusicological Tradition Ethnomusicologists are not alone in their attraction to participatory performance. Both the method of participant-observation and the topic of communal joining-in have long been matters of reflection for ethnographers. In particular, studies of small-scale egalitarian societies, such as the Mbuti of Central Africa (Turnbull 1961) and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (Schieffelin 1976; Feld 1982), have emphasized the links between participatory performance and social cohesion. Participation has likewise been a key theme in the field of performance studies (see Waterman, this volume), emerging out of collaborations between ethnographers (Richard Bauman, Victor Turner, Linda Hess), experimental theater directors (Amiri Baraka, Paul Carter Harrison, Joseph Chasikin), and theater scholars (­Margaret B. Wilkerson, Kimberly Benston),14 broadening the theoretical scope of participatory performance beyond staged theater into group bonding, public ritual, and politics. The concern of Victor Turner (1920–1983) with the processes and transformational effects of participatory ritual (rather than its abstract forms, artifacts, or symbols) led to his theory of communitas: “anti-structural” moments generated by participatory performance in which participants step out of conventional structures of social status, bonded together in a notional, ritually sustained equality (1969). But ethnomusicologists, perhaps more than anyone else, have thematized participation as a distinctive form of collective musical practice. Some, to be sure, simply note that some music is meant for joining in, not for spectators. But the most extensive and influential accounts of participation are infused with the metaphysical, intellectual, and political traditions outlined above. Building on a disciplinary aversion to the supposed mimetic inauthenticity of high art and mass media, as well as a disciplinary attraction to the methetic immediacy of performance, ethnomusicologists have long celebrated the power of participatory music to cultivate unity. Alan Lomax (1915–2002) teased out a cantometric link between the participatory “vocal empathy” of Pygmy choral singing and the famously egalitarian “cooperative style of their culture” (1962: 437).15 Edward O. Henry’s studies of South Asian folk song led him to a distinction between nonparticipatory and participatory music; the latter was aimed at “sonic unity” (1988: 149). Martin Clayton has demonstrated that the force of synchronized rhythmic entrainment is so strong that Hindustani tanpura players can unintentionally fall into sync when making music together (2007). John Miller Chernoff grounds participation in a normative formulation of African performance: “the African orchestra is not complete without a participant on the other side” (1979: 50). ­Drawing on ­A lfred Schütz’s formulation of “inner time,” Ruth Stone charted out a sophisticated account of the “inside” of Kpelle song, sustained by a “temporal and sonic fit” between performers, which allows a group of participants to “[go] down the same road” together (1982: 71). Victor Grauer goes so far as to claim that the participatory musical practice of polyphonic interlock (as in the “Pygmy/ Bushmen” style he identifies throughout the world) is the oldest and most fundamental musical practice in the world, providing the basic condition of possibility for egalitarian social life (2006). The first to systematically introduce participatory metaphysics into ethnomusicology was Charles Keil, a wide-ranging scholar of African and American musics. His theory of

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participatory discrepancies (PDs) (1987, 1995) explicitly drew inspiration from the metaphysical tradition of Lévy-Bruhl and Barfield. But Keil was also a musician and a veteran of the American participatory counterculture that looked to spontaneous involvement rather than aesthetic distance as a remedy for alienation. He thus drew on his practical experience with the “groovy, sensual musics of the world” (1995: 1) to link metaphysical participation with a participatory politics. Keil had already marked out the conceptual territory for this theory in earlier work (1966), which counterposed processual “engendered feeling” (linked to the pleasures of swing, movement, and dance) against syntactic “embodied meaning” (linked to the temporality of delayed gratification, aesthetic distance, and above all to ­Leonard Meyer’s theory of musical feeling [1956]). By 1987, Keil had re-conceived this binary in terms of participation and alienation, joining the solidarities of political resistance (“the opposite of alienation from nature, from society, from the body, from labor”) to a Barfieldian participatory metaphysics of unity. “If you can participate once,” he wrote, “in one song, dance, poem, rite, you can do it more times and in more ways until you are ‘at one’ with the entire universe” (1987: 276). One might expect that the musical expression of this metaphysical oneness would sound like eternal droning unison, but Keil argues that it is precisely discrepancies—processual tensions that never quite resolve into a stable sonic unity—that invite participation. PDs in music may be rhythmic (“the little discrepancies within a jazz drummer’s beat, between bass and drums, between rhythm section and soloists” [277]) or textural (“the blended harmonics of two trumpets … a certain bright and happy sound that invites people to get up and dance” [278]).16 But in all cases, the “urge to merge” (1987: 276) in participatory oneness is brought about by dynamic tensions rather than resolutions and is itself a form of lived cosmology, in which “the universe is open, imperfect, and subject to redefinition by every emergent self ” (1994a: 171). The theoretical power of Keil’s work, however, is not in offering “mere ideas” (Keil, personal communication to Feld, quoted in Feld 1988: 104). Like Barfield, Keil teaches by example; his poetic style (filled with lilting rhythms, ecstatic interjections, and participatory exhortations to a prior “we”) performs, rather than merely describes, these discrepant soundings. He offers an invitation to dance. One prominent interlocutor to take him up on this invitation was Steven Feld (see the discussion of groove, below). Their many years of improvised dialogue, shot through with interruptions and provocations (published as the book Music Grooves, 1994b), foreground the active process of theorizing. Two key theoretical dispositions emerge in this work, and they are mapped onto a twentieth-century cultural geography of Manhattan: the “uptown” of official scholarship (heady, intellectual, reflexive, distanced, mimetic) and the “downtown” of poetry and musicking (groovy, emotional, activist, involved, participatory). Keil’s practical ethics of doing theory is quite explicit: rather than saying that we need to think through the fixed concepts in order to grasp the groove … it’s the reverse; we need to groove more in order to break open some concepts, drop others, keep all mere ideas at a safe distance. (Keil, personal communication to Feld, quoted in Feld 1988: 104) Thomas Turino brought participation into the mainstream of “uptown” ethnomusicological inquiry in the 2000s. Turino explicitly draws on Keil’s work on participation (2008: 26) and shares his zeal for lived participatory relationships in which “we feel, for those best moments, as though our selves had merged” (19). His key theoretical distinction, between participatory music and presentational music, was at first a way to account for a distinctive indigenous participatory ethic of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, which, he argues, invites “the fullest participation possible” and where “there is little or no distinction between performers and audience.” This is contrasted with a presentational capitalist-cosmopolitan

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ethic that “emphasizes rationalist control of the performance, increased objectification of the art object, and the distinctions between artists and audience that make ticket and recording sales possible” (Turino 2000: 46–50). The distinction between participation and presentation later became the key guiding theme of his influential Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (2008). Turino’s approach is novel in several ways. First, while Keil tends to focus on the smallscale dynamics of groove and participation, gesturing only occasionally toward pre-given “societies,” Turino is deeply concerned with the power of participatory performance to shape cultural formations. This emphasis on the politics of participation offers an alternative to the politics of re-presentation that had dominated ethnomusicological studies of identity in the 1990s. Second, Turino’s account of participation is pitched in terms of C. S. Peirce’s semiotics (see Beaster-Jones, this volume), accounting not only for linguistic reference, but also for non-verbal signs that seem to mean what they mean directly—by virtue of association and resemblance rather than arbitrary symbolism. This expansive semiotics offers a language to describe the power of participation as a participatory immediacy, rather than a symbolic mediation. Turino pays particular attention to one of Pierce’s sign types, the dicent-index (a “sign of actual relations and fact”) by virtue of which “direct kinesic and sonic response to others may well be experienced as a deep type of communion, although one can rarely fully express the feeling in words” (1999: 241). In Turino’s later work, he creatively maps Peirce’s ontological categories (the thirdness of mediated re-presentation, the secondness of direct relation, and the firstness of pure being) onto an original “phenomenology” of musical states (2012).17 Thus, in Turino’s scheme, distanced reflection on music corresponds to thirdness; direct participation corresponds to secondness, in which “participants are fully in the moment and integrally united with each-other-and-sound-and-motion” (2014: 204); and firstness corresponds to an ineffable state of pure being, where “all thought and perception have ceased” and where the conscious self “is in-and-of-itself ” (205). At many points in Turino’s writing, distanced reflection and thirdness in general is set up as a sort of problem to be solved, presented as a barrier that keeps us from “the most direct way of being-in-the-world” (2014: 213). For these moments, Turino’s ethical prescription is very much in tune with Keil: “we should simply participate” (213). At other times, unlike Keil, Turino also suggests a competing ethics of a “balanced self ” that requires distanced reflection as well as participation. Turino also offers a vision of participation that is ethnographically observable from the outside, drawing on social scientific theories of rhythmic solidarity—synchrony (Hall 1983), flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1975, discussed below), and “muscular bonding” (McNeill 1995). It is partially for this reason that Turino’s version of participation has proven to be such a handy resource for ethnomusicologists who want to account for the power of collective music making (Widdess 2013: 124; Fischer 2014: 18; Miller 2016). Likewise, Diane Thram’s inquiry into music’s therapeutic potential posits a single efficacious principle: it is participation (the “joining of one’s individual energy with the communal energy of the whole”) that generates “a physical release, a unique buoyancy, a feeling of being carried or made weightless,” all of which “has a therapeutic effect … on the entire being of the individual” and generates a (presumably desirable) “loss of self-consciousness” (2002: 135). As we will see, the controversies over participation often hinge precisely on the ethical and political value of this self-consciousness.18

Related Theories of Musical Process: Groove, Musicking, Flow Groove, in its technical sense (developed rigorously in Steven Feld’s “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style” [1988]), is not so far off from its casual sense: a distinctive rhythmic dynamism, ever-changing yet coherent, like a gait, that one enters into. Even on the scale of seconds,

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it is easy to feel when one has entered a particular groove. Like participation, grooviness is known in part by its pleasures: “pleasurable sensations ranging from arousal to relaxation,” “a positive physical and emotional attachment,” comfort, and “feelingful participation” (1988: 75). But one never simply grooves in general; one is necessarily in some p­ articular groove or another. Responding (like Keil) to Leonard Meyer’s canonical formulation of style (1967), Feld’s grooves are always local and specific. But unlike Meyer’s highly ­mediated metaphorical workings of style, the particularity of each groove lies, in principle, in an unreflective, “iconic” homology between style and lifeworld.19 In other words, each groove, in principle, not only seems natural and inevitable but actually is a “direct” and “feelingful” connection between the “thing-out-there” and the ­“ feeling-in-here” (1988:  93). The model groove that Feld returns to again and again is dulugu ganalan ­(“lift-up-over-sounding,” a Kaluli practice of creating collective, n ­ on-overlapping, layered musical textures). Dulugu ganalan, to the extent that it is a groove in Feld’s sense, is in principle iconic with a general Kaluli style of ethics, politics, and labor: “collaborative autonomy,” “anarchistic synchrony,” “non-hierarchical yet synchronous, layered, fluid group action” (83–84). To conceive of dulugu ganalan as a groove, then, is to consider it as a “distilled essence” (74) of Kaluli life.20 These distilled essences can, in principle, be heard in recordings, allowing comparative work on groove across many places and times without extensive participant-observation. This enables Kofi Agawu, for example, to assert that groove in general and a specific kind of African groove in particular (rooted in divisive time, inviting participation) is the essence of African music in general, an aesthetic and ethical lingua franca across hundreds of ethnicities; non-groove practices (such as the additive time of declamation or reflective listening) emerge only as occasional exceptions to the rule (2015: 258–59). Mark Abel, on the other hand, claims that groove is something rather more musically and historically specific: metrically multi-leveled, pulse-based time marked by syncopation and backbeat, originating in early twentieth-century Western popular music (2014). Though Abel’s narrow sense of groove likely would not accommodate Ewe dance music or Kaluli dulugu ganalan, he nonetheless follows Feld’s path through style and iconicity, suggesting that groove is essentially emancipatory, reworking the “the abstract, alienated time of capitalism” into a “praxial figuration of a liberated temporality” (256). The creative reworking of the term musicking by Christopher Small (1927–2011) opens similar ontological questions about essence and process. The word itself is no stranger than the common English word “picnicking” and has for centuries been used to refer to singing, dancing, and playing instruments. But Small’s technical usage is far broader: “to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by [composing], or by dancing” (1998: 9). This much seems flatly relativistic. And yet it becomes clear that, for Small, the morally normative way to “take part” is through participation. His account of concert hall listening practices, for example, describes a loss of sociability, a lack of communication and social contact among performers and audience members (27). More importantly, musicking opens a crucial analytic horizon, directing our attention to actions (singing, listening, amplifying, dancing) rather than to musical objects (works, scores, recordings, genres). As with the conventional usages of dulugu ganalan (Feld 1988: 83), to musick grammatically requires us to consider verbs alongside nouns and thus to emphasize process over product. A rigorous commitment to this analytic would disclose a world in which “there is no such thing as music” because “music is not a thing at all, but an activity, something that people do” (2). This offers rather different possibilities than does groove; a hard ontological commitment to processes could never disclose anything as fixed as a distilled essence. The musicking heuristic likewise opens up a rich practical politics of

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musical action, in contrast to the more familiar interpretive project of excavating the politics contained in a musical object. For example, it opens the consideration of violent (176), misogynistic (150), and disruptive (160) acts of musicking, rather than simply assigning abstract violence, misogyny, or rupture to a text. A rather more individualistic way of describing participation in music is through recourse to the concept of flow, given its technical sense by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement” (1975: 36). Flow states seem to occur in complex activities (such as basketball, chess, or rock climbing) that are neither boringly easy nor frustratingly difficult (49). Like participation, flow is defined oppositionally against a taken-for-granted background state of self-consciousness and reflective cognition. Flow thus stands out in relief against what it is not, marked by a lack of dualistic, distanced reflection (38), a limited field of stimuli (40), an absence of extrinsic goals, and a loss of self-awareness (42). On the surface, this would seem to account well for many everyday musical pleasures. But Csikszentmihalyi begins and ends with the individual, and thus his sense of “flow” does not account easily for the emergent socialities of participation. To the extent that there are other people involved at all, flow emerges against a static social backdrop with fixed rules in which there is “no need to negotiate roles,” “no deviance,” and no ethical reflection “about what should or should not be done” (43). While most ethnomusicological accounts of collective musicking concern themselves with forms of social relation, flow largely foregrounds pleasures, annoyances, and sensations. Indeed, the basic psychological terms of flow analysis are grounded in the economy of individual attention (49), and the principal theoretical utility of flow is in accounting for the intrinsic pleasure that a flow activity offers a single person (1). Even the “politics of enjoyment” that ­Csikszentmihalyi hazards (185 and passim) is grounded in arranging for the personal contentment of individual laborers at work, rather than in any sort of solidarity, resistance, or structural reform. Ethnomusicologists have nonetheless found ways of applying the notion of flow to manifestly relational situations, in which flow states emerge precisely from group interaction (e.g. McLeod and Herndon 1980; Turino 2008; Widdess 2013). As Turino points out, flow is only one means among many for achieving a participatory “secondness” (see above) of direct relation (2014: 206).

Participatory Listening For many advocates of participation, merely listening to music is presented as the opposite of joining in. But this assumes a very particular figuration of listening (distanced, aesthetic, structural, seated, still), geared toward discerning the large-scale designs of art music and thus modeled, in many ways, on seeing at a distance. There are, of course, other ways of listening, some of which would seem to be inherently participatory. Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, construes listening to timbre as a sort of resonance characterized by “methexis: participation, contagion (contact), contamination, metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric transference” ([2002] 2007: 22). In contrast to a violent politics of the “objectifying gaze,” Nancy’s participatory “politics of sonority” offers a political vision founded on mutual resonance between free individual subjects, which Lauri Siisiäinen, writing on Nancy’s work, characterizes as “free from the domination of the gaze” (2010: 40, n13; see also Erlmann 2010). Architectural theorist Paul Carter has likewise advocated for a move away from a mimetic, visualist politics of re-presentation to a methetic “acoustic knowledge paradigm” modeled on the ambiguities of ever-present echoes and mishearings, an orientation to listening that “presupposes a participatory model of making and marking” (2001). Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s account of clashing regimes of aurality in colonial Colombia draws on Carter’s work to highlight the participatory

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ambiguities of echoic mishearing, in contrast to the mimetic certainties of colonial sonic re-presentation (2014). Maria A. G. Witek likewise focuses on the aural capabilities (“the groove state of listening”) that make participation in groove possible in the first place (2009). In her account of “deep listening” practices, Judith Becker argues that a porous, participatory form of the self is necessary for trancing, in contrast to a “bounded, unique, inviolate” self that resists trance (2004: 89). The very prospect of a number of people participating in a shared musical world would seem to likewise require some notion of shared practices of listening: shared temporalities, shared attunements, shared ways of musical being and knowing. Steven Feld’s acoustemologies (common, mutually resonant acoustic epistemologies among groups of aural subjects) would thus seem to be a necessary condition of participation (2015). One conceptual pitfall in assuming such a principled commonality, however, is the conflation of a contingent, local acoustemology (say, of a choir or a hunting party) with a putative ethnic acoustemology characteristic of an entire culture “group.” Ethnomusicologists have thus had to resist the temptation to assign acoustemologies to cultures (e.g. “Kurdish acoustemology,” “­Yanomanö acoustemology,” “Western acoustemology”) as though each person in a society, by virtue of their essential habits of listening, spends their days in a single, culturally determined acoustical world. This would reduce a processual, participatory way of knowing to a static collective re-presentation, returning us to a familiar “net of reifications” (Feld 1984: 405) made of imaginary, internally homogeneous (though empirically elusive) social totalities. (The theme of listening practices and Feld’s acoustemology are also central in the field of sound studies. See the chapter by Meizel and Daughtry in this volume.)

Participatory Powers and Dangers From corporate drum circles to esoteric initiation rites, from Lock! Her! Up! to the Occupy movement to ecstatic Sunday morning hymn singing, participatory performance is everywhere. Participation, famously a tool of anti-capitalist countercultures, has also become a cornerstone of the “new capitalism,” widely prescribed for teambuilding exercises and optimizing productive efficiency (Vrakas 2015; Saddler 2017). Given this wide practical reach, few theorists have been willing to categorically embrace or reject musical participation as such. The loudest critic of participatory musical consciousness was Theodor Adorno (see Manuel, this volume, and Wallach and Clinton, this volume), who famously warned that “rhythmically obedient” types attracted to popular dance music were “susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism” ([1941] 2002: 460). But even the most enthusiastic advocates of participation acknowledge this much. Keil warns of “participations fueled by fear and desperation” that foster “cargo-cult beliefs,” and he furthermore suggests that participation can become “the very essence of fascism” when practiced by “large-scale nation-state organizations with aggressive purposes” (1987: 276). (Keil’s litmus test for these bad participations is, however, a bit vague, hinging on whether they are “large-scale” and whether they exacerbate inequality (277)—the latter of which would seem to reduce participation to a mere means to an end.) Turino, noting that “the powerful semiotic potentials of music can be used in mass movements for dangerous ends,” dedicates a sizable chunk of Music as Social Life to Nazi participatory music, the explicit goal of which was that “the German people might be willingly led anywhere and to do anything” (2008: 210). Nor is participation necessarily empowering, as evidenced by the mandatory participatory singing forced upon Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps (Brauer 2016). Even Durkheim’s participatory collective effervescences took on a chilling new dimension after his death. The rise of fascism in Europe shocked his student Marcel Mauss, who was horrified to see that the populations of modern nation-states “could be

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hypnotized … and set in motion like a children’s roundabout.” Where an earlier generation of sociologists could romantically hold out hope that “it was in the collective mind that the individual could find the basis and sustenance for his liberty, his independence, his ­personality, and his criticism,” the twentieth century revealed the political dangers of participatory collectivities (Mauss in Lukes 1985: 339, n71). The very idea of participation remains intellectually seductive, and one well-established critical tradition urges caution precisely for this reason. Michelle Kisliuk points out that the “mystique” of egalitarian participation may well lead ethnographers to overlook subtle contestation, resistance, and inequality in group performance (2000). The very idea of radical immediacy underlying so many ethnomusicological construals of participation would seem to surrender the critical function of ethnomusicology in unveiling oppressive forms of mediation and mimesis. Harris Berger critiques Keil’s model in which sonic discrepancies automatically and universally generate ecstatic participation, pointing out the severe moral stakes of a normative theory in which refusing to participate can only be aberrant (Berger 2010: 82–84). David Hesmondhalgh’s careful consideration of participation locates the desire for social integration in capitalist modernity, critiques the “reflectionism” that assigns participatory politics to participatory performance, and hazards a psychoanalytic cau­ mmanuel tion about founding a musical politics on a yearning for unity (2013: 100–01). E ­Levinas noted that Lévy-Bruhl’s conception of participatory being had, for better or worse, reshaped twentieth-century philosophy by placing collective social experience at the center of being (1998: 51); he cautioned that a participatory orientation in which “the subject not only sees the other but is the other” ([1947] 1987: 43) collapses alterity into a comprehensive oneness, reducing true ethical responsibility to the mere maintenance of an all-­consuming self.21 To the extent that participation excludes “any possibility of duplicity” (Turino 2008: 136), it is a form of power, albeit a pleasurable one, that establishes “an order from which no one may keep his distance” (Levinas [1961] 1979: 21). In a recent essay (2017), I have extended Levinas’s critique of participation into a consideration of what ethnomusicology might gain from a musical metaphysics grounded in irreducible alterity, rather than participatory unity. Is there an “iconicity of style” between performance and politics that would allow us to groovologically distinguish between participatory singing at Nazi rallies and at civil rights marches simply by listening? Or is participation simply a neutral, universal musical technology put to various uses? Is it possible to imagine a laudable participatory politics in the service of an oppressive political regime? Or does advocating for participation simply amount to advocating for the political solidarity of a favored social formation? No one doubts that participation can be pleasurable and powerful. But if we are willing to admit that these practices may feel good without being good (or, for that matter, without necessarily being evil), then theories of participation offer a way of understanding these powerful entanglements of performance, metaphysics, ethics, and politics.

Notes 1 The notion of participation is related to the notion of social practice, and this latter theme has been of interest to scholars in a wide range of academic disciplines and intellectual movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On social practice and practice theory, see Text Box 2.1. —Harris M. Berger. 2 The translation of methexis into Latin and then English adds some conceptual baggage not found in the Greek. For example, “participating” in a survey, a vote, a program, and so forth, involves hundreds or millions of independent parts-of-a-whole who never meet each other (Gadamer [1988] 2007: 311). The theological sense of active liturgical participation (participatio actuosa) joins the Greek and the Latin meanings, so that participation in ritual is, in principle, a form of immediate unity (see Skeris 1990).

Theories of Participation  229 3 In Plato’s dialog the Parmenides, these metaphors are presented as a provisional dialectical scaffolding, rather than as a final answer (131b), and the familiar images of “horizontal” unity are quickly shown to be inadequate to the larger metaphysical task at hand. 4 For example, 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, in which Paul speaks of methexis and koinónia (communion) in parallel, as though they were synonyms, or 12:26, where he writes “if one member suffers, all suffer together.” 5 On participatory metaphysics in Christian liturgy, see Cavanaugh (2003: 184) and Tilling (2015: 265–66). Rice (2016) reports a similar metaphor, perhaps inspired by the Pauline image in the Sunni homiletic tradition. As far as I know, there has not yet been a comprehensive study of participation in Arabic literature, but among the Arabic translations for methexis were al-qub ūl and al-ishtirāk. I am grateful to Carl Ernst and Cristina D’Ancona for these leads. 6 For more on this tradition, see especially the neoplatonic commentaries of Plotinus, Proclus, ­Porphyry, and Iamblichus, many of which are available in Algis Uzdavinys’s The Golden Chain (2004). Book IV of Proclus’s commentary on the Parmenides, in particular, is dedicated to problems of methexis. 7 Durkheim’s ideas were foundational for the development of functionalism and structural-­f unctionalism in the discipline of anthropology. See Berger and Stone (Introduction, this volume). 8 S. A. Mousalimas (1990: 44) points out that Lévy-Bruhl was concerned with the metaphysics of the methexis/mimesis binary from the beginning to the end of his work. See also Throop (2003). 9 See especially the thorough and sympathetic critique of Lévy-Bruhl by Edward Evans-Pritchard (1934), as well as his productive correspondence with Lévy-Bruhl (1952). 10 On the notion of modernity, see Manuel (this volume) and Wallach and Clinton (this volume). 11 See McNeill (1995) on the history of military “muscular bonding,” Van Orden (2004) on music and dance in early modern French military discipline, Kertzer (1988: 13) on ritual and politics in classical China, and Skeris (1990) on participation in liturgy. 12 On French Revolutionary song, see Mason (1996) and McKinley (2008). On singing in Indian ­a nti-colonial nationalism, see Bakhle (2005) on musicologist Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande’s nationalist vision of India singing a song together, and see Schultz (2013) on nationalist kirtan performance. On the songs of the Industrial Workers of the World, see Denisoff (1983) on “magnetic” traditions of participatory song. 13 On horizontalism and direct action, see Sitrin (2012) and Dean (2017). See also Gayatri Spivak’s wise caution against conflating political representation and metaphysical re-presentation (1988). 14 It’s worth noting that Richard Schechner, one of the founders of the field of performance studies, fits in all three of these categories. For a further discussion, see Waterman (this volume). 15 On Lomax, see also Manuel (this volume). 16 For multiple perspectives on PDs, see the special issue of Ethnomusicology dedicated to this topic (Titon 1995). 17 Though Peirce himself seldom used this term, Turino’s approach is intended as “phenomenological,” in the broad sense that it is meant to account for lived experience. On Peirce, Turino, and phenomenology, see Berger (2015, n13). 18 For a related discussion of self-consciousness in performance, see Berger (this volume). 19 Like Turino, Feld looks to Peircean iconicity as a justification for im-mediacy. The role of Peirce’s interpretant, however, is passed over in silence. On homology theory, see Manuel (this volume). 20 See Feld’s and Keil’s conversation “Dialogue 2: Grooving on Participation” in Music Grooves for a dialectical elaboration on the idea of internally consistent, holistic “shared culture” (1994a: 161). 21 On Levinas and phenomenology, see Berger (this volume).

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232  Matthew Rahaim Stone, Ruth M. (1982) 2010. Let the Inside Be Sweet: The Interpretation of Music Event Among the Kpelle of Liberia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/Trickster Press. Thram, Diane. 2002. “Therapeutic Efficacy of Music-making: Neglected Aspect of Human Experience Integral to Performance Process.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 34: 129–38. Throop, C. Jason. 2003. “Minding Experience: An Exploration of the Concept of ‘Experience’ in the Early French Anthropology of Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, and Lévi-Strauss.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 39 (4): 365–82. Tilling, Chris. 2015. Paul’s Divine Christology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Titon, Jeff Todd, ed. 1995. “Participatory Discrepancies.” Special issue, Ethnomusicology 39 (1). Turino, Tom. 1999. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology 43 (2): 221–55. ———. 2000. Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2012. “Peircean Phenomenology and Musical Experience.” Karpa 5.1–5.2. http://www.cal statela.edu/misc/karpa/Karpa5.1/Site%20Folder/turino1.html. ———. 2014. “Peircean Thought as Core Theory for a Phenomenological Ethnomusicology.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 185–221. Turnbull, Colin. 1961. The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo. New York: Simon & Schuster. Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Orden, Kate. 2004. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vrakas, George. 2015. “What Aristotle and Plato Have to Say about Team Development?” https:// georgevrakas.com/favourite-quotations/practical-philosophy/what-aristotle-and-plato-haveto-say-about-team-development/. Widdess, Richard. 2013. Dāphā: Sacred Singing in a South Asian City; Music, Performance, and Meaning in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Farnham: Ashgate. Witek, Maria A. G. 2009. “Groove Experience: Emotional and Physiological Responses to Groove-based Music.” Proceedings of the 7th Triennial Conference of European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, ­edited by Jukka Louhivuori, Tuomas Eerola, Suvi Saarikallio, Tommi Himberg, and Päivi-Sisko E ­ erola, ­573–82. Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä.

Notes on Contributors

Jayson Beaster-Jones is Associate Professor of Music in the Global Arts Studies Program at the University of California, Merced. An ethnomusicologist whose work focuses on the music and film industries of India, he is the author of Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Music Commodities, Markets, and Values: Music as Merchandise (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of Music in Contemporary Indian Film (Routledge, 2017). He has also published a number of essays in academic journals and edited volumes. Harris M. Berger  is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology and Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His work examines American popular music, heavy metal, and the theoretical foundations of ethnomusicology and folklore studies. His books include Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (co-authored by Giovanna P. Del Negro), and Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. He has served as co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore, a series editor of Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture book series, and President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Esther Clinton  is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Popular Culture in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University, and she received her PhD in folklore from Indiana University with a focus on narrative and Old English literature. Her research interests include the history of ideas, proverbs, narrative, tricksters, ethnomusicology, and Southeast Asia. Her work has appeared in Asian Music, Journal of the National Medical Association, and Proverbium, and in the books Archetypes and Motifs in Folk Literature, The Palgrave Handbook of Leisure Theory, Modern Heavy Metal, Heavy Metal and the Communal Experience, and Connecting Metal to Culture. J. Martin Daughtry  is Associate Professor of Music and Sound Studies at New York University. He teaches and writes on acoustic violence, human and nonhuman vocality, listening, jazz, Russian-language sung poetry, sound studies, the auditory imagination, and air. His monograph Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford, 2015) received a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers and the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. At present, he is writing a book about vocality and environment in the Anthropocene. Maureen Mahon  is Associate Professor of Music at New York University. She is the author of Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Duke University Press, 2004). Her work has appeared in American Ethnologist, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Ethnomusicology, and

234  Notes on Contributors

online at EbonyJet.com and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum website. Her book Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Peter Manuel has researched and published extensively on musics of India, the Caribbean, Spain, and elsewhere. His several books include Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae; Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India; and Tales, Tunes, and Tassa Drums: Retention and Invention in Indo-Caribbean Music. He has also produced three documentary videos, including Tassa Thunder: Folk Music from India to the Caribbean. Formerly an amateur performer of sitar, jazz piano, flamenco guitar, and highland bagpipes, he teaches ethnomusicology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Katherine Meizel  is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol was published in 2011. She has co-edited the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and authored the forthcoming Multivocality: An Ethnography of Singing on the Borders of Identity. Matthew Rahaim  is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of ­M innesota, with affiliate appointments in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature and in Religious Studies. His first book, Musicking Bodies (2012), dealt with the transmission of gesture among Hindustani singers. His current book project, Ways of the Voice, investigates the cultivation of vocal dispositions among a wide range of singers in North India—Bollywood singers, qawwals, classical vocalists, and purveyors of the eclectic contemporary styles known as “singing Sufi” and “singing Western.” He is also a performing Hindustani vocalist in the Gwalior tradition, trained under L. K. Pandit. Ruth M. Stone is Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology and African Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Her research has focused on the temporal dimensions of musical performances among the Kpelle of Liberia, West Africa, which she has detailed in Let the Inside Be Sweet (Indiana University Press, 1982; Trickster Press, 2nd edition, 2010) and Dried Millet Breaking (Indiana University Press, 1988). Among her publications are Music in West Africa (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Theory for ­Ethnomusicology (Routledge, 2007). She is also the editor of the Africa volume of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998). Jane C. Sugarman is Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Ethnomusicology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of ­Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (University of ­Chicago Press, 1997), as well as numerous articles on music and dance in and from southeastern Europe as they relate to gender and sexuality, nation, diaspora, transnational circulation, and conflict situations. Her current research examines mediated Albanian musics from the former Yugoslavia and their role in imagining “modern” Albanian identities. Jeremy Wallach  is Professor of Popular Culture in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University. He has written or co-written over two dozen research articles; co-edited, with Esther Clinton, a special issue of Asian Music (2013); authored the monograph Modern Noise, Fluid Genres: Popular Music in Indonesia, 1997–2001 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008; Indonesian Edition, Komunitas Bambu, 2017) and co-edited, with Harris M. Berger and Paul D. Greene, Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Duke University Press, 2011). A founding member and former chair of the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Wallach is a Series Editor of the Music/Culture book series at Wesleyan University Press.

Notes on Contributors  235

Ellen Waterman’s interdisciplinary research interests include improvisation, experimental performance, sound, identity, and ecology. Her early work as an artist-scholar focused on Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer’s environmental music theatre. Waterman is a core member of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, and she co-founded the flagship journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Etudes critiques en improvisation. She is co-editor (with Gillian Siddall) of Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity (Duke University Press, 2016). Waterman is the inaugural Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at Carleton University.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. AACM see Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) Abel, Mark 225 Abu-Lughod, Lila 84, 86, 90 acoustemology 178, 227 Adorno, Theodor 54, 60–1, 65, 127, 227 African American music 40–1, 108, 159–61, 212–15; see also specific music genres African Americans 81–2, 100–1, 103, 105–10, 156, 180 African diaspora 99–100, 103, 110 Agawu, Kofi 225 Ahmed, Sara 215 Albania 86, 89–90 Alberti, Leone 64 Althusser, Louis 65, 76, 78–80 Amico, Stephen 215 analytic philosophy 32–3, 209 anthropology 18n1, 20n15, 29, 73–5, 76–7, 145–8, 196; ethnomusicology and 3, 5–6; feminist 71, 74–5; gender studies and 83–6; of voice 190–1, 194; see also cultural anthropology; linguistic anthropology Appadurai, Arjun 114, 123–5, 179 Asian Americans 81, 106, 130, 155, 157 Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) 157, 159–60 Attali, Jacques 159, 162 Auslander, Philip 144 Austin, J. L. 32–3, 79, 143, 152 Bakhtin, Mikhail 29, 41, 122, 151, 194 Barfield, Owen 221, 223 Barthes, Roland 189–90 Bataille, George 158 Bateson, Gregory 32–3, 143–4 Bauman, Richard 32, 144, 146, 164n6 Beaster-Jones, Jayson 37, 46n24 Beauvoir, Simone de 208 Becker, Judith 227 Bendrups, Dan 148 Berger, Harris M. 58, 144, 211–15, 228 Berlin School 1

Bhabha, Homi 119, 122 Bhatkhande,Vishnu Narayan 43, 229n12 Bigenho, Michelle 195–6 Birmingham School 61–2, 66n10, 101–3, 111n6 black feminism 62, 73, 81–2, 103, 105, 110 Blacking, John 5, 8, 29 blues music 15, 58–9 Boas, Franz 99, 101 Bohlman, Philip 104–5, 193 Boilés, Charles 38–9 Bollywood film music 42–4, 56, 63, 129; see also film music Borgo, David 157–8 Born, Georgina 162 Bourdieu, Pierre 39, 53–4, 61, 76–8, 80 bourgeoisie 51–3, 55–6, 58–60, 64–5, 115, 221 Brazil 119, 144, 157, 193 Brown, Jayna 87–8 Bühler, Karl 143 Bulgaria 210–11 Burke, Patrick 107 Butler, Judith 79–81, 85, 143–5, 152–3, 158, 185, 208 Buxton, David 60 Byl, Julia 126 Canada 147–9, 161 cantometrics 63, 222 capitalism 51–3, 55–62, 63–5, 115, 118, 124–6, 227 Carby, Hazel 102 Caribbean 100, 110, 117, 119 Carr, Daphne 180 Carson, Charles 38 Carter, Paul 226 Cheng, William 183 Chernoff, John Miller 222 Chion, Michel 183–4 Chomsky, Noam 16, 28–9, 31, 35–6, 43 Christianity 89, 116, 191, 220; see also religion CIS see critical improvisation studies civil rights movement 72–3, 100, 103, 107, 157, 221, 228

238 Index Clayton, Martin 45, 222 Clinton, Esther 129 Colombia 126, 192–3, 226 colonialism: European 56, 107, 116–17, 192–3; gender and 83, 88–9, 91; globalization and 123–6; history of 116–17; Marxism and 114–15; race and 110; see also globalization; post-colonialism Combahee River Collective 73, 81, 103, 109 communication 26–7, 29, 31, 33, 35, 44–5; see also language Connell, R. W. 83–4 Connor, Steven 191–2 Conquergood, Dwight 149–53 Cooper, Robin 35–6 Coplan, David 56, 59 Côte d’Ivoire 130 countercultures 221, 223, 227 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 82, 103–4 crisis of representation 6, 18–19n1, 114 critical improvisation studies 141–2, 155–63 critical race theory (CRT) 73, 82, 103–4 critical theory 19n4, 19–20n5; see also critical race theory (CRT); cultural studies; gender; Marxism; phenomenology; post-colonialism; race Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 214, 226 cultural anthropology 99, 123–4, 142, 144–7, 150, 209 cultural studies 61–2, 102–3; see also Birmingham School Cusick, Suzanne 192 Daughtry, J. Martin 179–80, 186–7, 216n7 Davis, Angela 81 Davis, Tracy 141 Deaf culture 185, 194–5 decolonization 13–14, 91, 107, 110, 117–19, 131–2, 163, 196 deep structure 28, 35 Denzin, Norman 150–1 Derrida, Jacques 79, 121–2, 152, 189–90, 208–9 Descartes, René 30, 116; see also Enlightenment Diamond, Beverley 107, 123 digital technologies 57, 63, 91, 115, 125, 127–8, 182–3; see also technologies, sound disability studies 159, 163, 184–5, 194–5 Dolar, Mladen 189–90 Du Bois, W. E. B. 100–1, 109 Dunn, Leslie 193–4 Durkheim, Emile 220, 227 Eagleton, Terry 52 Eastern Europe 58, 129 ecomusicology 37, 177, 180–1 Egypt 84–5 Eidsheim, Nina Sun 188, 191–2 embodiment 30, 54, 183, 189, 205–8, 211; experiences of 154–5; performance and 76, 149–52; situated practice and 141; of songs 39; of voices 177, 191–3, 195

Enlightenment 79, 92n9, 116, 191, 196; see also Descartes, René; Kant, Immanuel; modernity Erlmann,Veit 59, 126 ethnic studies 73, 83, 100, 106 ethnicity 51, 54–5, 57–9, 61, 90, 100, 105, 111n2 ethnography of performance 145–9 ethnomusicology: anthropology and 3, 5–6, 20n15; critical improvisation studies and 157–9; deafness and 195; disability studies and 185; gender and 85–90; globalization and 127–31; Marxism and 51, 55–6, 58, 60–3, 65–6; participation and 222–4, 228; performance and 141–5, 147–52, 163; performative ethnography and 152–5; phenomenology and 204, 207, 209–15; race and 105–10; sound studies and 176–80, 183–5; voice and 190–1, 193, 195–6; see also research methods Fales, Cornelia 191 Fanon, Frantz 100–1, 119, 121, 207–8 Fausto-Sterling, Anne 73 Feld, Steven 36–7, 51, 127, 178–9, 190–1, 194, 223–5 Feldman, Martha 192 feminism 71–5, 79, 80–5, 104–5, 121; Marxism and 62; performance and 145, 153, 158, 162; see also black feminism; women’s studies feudalism 53–5, 56, 64 fieldwork see research methods film music 38, 61, 183; see also Bollywood film music Finland 130 Fischlin, Daniel 159–60 Fisher, Daniel 215 flow states 214, 226 folklore 20n6, 32, 54, 142–4, 146–7 Foucault, Michel 61, 77–80, 84–7, 107, 143, 208–9 Fox, Aaron 41, 58 framing 32, 143–4 Frankenberg, Ruth 104 Frankfurt School 60, 127 free jazz 155–6, 159 Frege, Gottlob 32–3, 205, 209 Freud, Sigmund 79–80 Friedson, Steven 211 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 207, 210 Geertz, Clifford 3–4, 75, 150, 204 gender 55, 73, 192; categories of 79–80, 83, 90–1; colonialism and 83, 88–9, 91; ethnomusicology and 85–90; identities 152; in India 88–9; Marxism and 51, 57, 61–2; music and 71, 74, 81–2, 84–91; norms 71, 86, 89; performance of 85–91; performativity and 79–81, 152–3; phenomenology and 208, 215; sexuality and 16, 72–7, 79, 84–5, 158, 215; voice and 192; see also black feminism; feminism; intersectionality; LGBT issues; masculinity gender studies and anthropology 83–6 generative grammar 28, 35, 43

Index  239 genre 29, 37–8, 40–1, 58, 66n5, 105–9, 126–30, 134n23, 146, 184, 210 Ghana 211 Gill, Denise 185–6 Gillespie, Dizzy 161 Gilman, Lisa 86–7 Gilroy, Paul 40, 88, 102–3, 120, 126 globalization 17, 52, 179; colonialism and 123–6; ethnomusicology and 127–31; post-colonialism and 114–16, 119–23; see also colonialism; post-colonialism Goffman, Erving 32, 144, 163n2 Gopinath, Sumanth 182–3 gospel music 110 Gramsci, Antonio 61–2, 75–6, 83, 102 Grauer,Victor 222 Greene, Shane 130 groove 161, 213, 219, 223–6, 227 Guy, Nancy 180 Hahn, Tomie 154–5, 158 Hall, Stuart 61, 75, 101–3, 109 Hannerz, Ulf 124 Harkness, Nicholas 191 Harris, Cheryl I. 104 Harvey, David 57 Hauser, Arnold 53, 64 Hayes, Eileen 105–6 heavy metal 66n5, 129, 164n9, 212–14 Hebdige, Dick 61 Heble, Ajay 155–6, 159–60, 162 hegemony 51–2, 87, 159; masculinity and 83, 191; resistance and 59–63, 65 Heidegger, Martin 206–7, 209–11, 215n2 Helmreich, Stefan 183 Henry, Edward O. 222 Herzog, George 35 Hesmondhalgh, David 228 Hindustani music 191, 211, 222 hip-hop 37, 57–8, 82, 129, 180 Hoggart, Richard 102 homology theory 45n3, 63, 66n10, 225 homosexuality, historical construction of 72, 78, 82; see also LGBT issues hooks, bell 81 Hosokawa, Shuhei 129 Hume, David 116 Husserl, Edmund 15, 164n9, 204–7, 209, 211, 215n1 Hymes, Dell 31–2, 144, 146 identity: African American 100–1, 103–4; cultural 61, 192, 194, 215; disidentification and 80–1; embodiment and 77, 81; fluidity of 149, 153; formation 80, 83; gender 11, 80–1, 152–3; improvisation and 157; music and 38; national 55; performance of 144–5, 191–3; personal 57, 65; politics 73, 92n5; race and 100–2, 105–10, 192–3; socio-economic class and 58–9; voice and 189, 195; see also gender; intersectionality; LGBT issues; performance; performativity; race

improvisation 40–1, 141–2, 155–63 Indian music 55–6, 61–3, 88–9, 126, 191; see also Bollywood film music; Hindustani music; Karnatic music indieglobalization 130 Indigenous music 144, 180, 193 Indigenous peoples 107, 109–10, 117–18, 123, 127, 220; see also specific cultural groups Indonesia 58, 124, 127–8, 130 Ingarden, Roman 206 intersectionality 59, 62, 72–3, 81–3, 88, 103, 105, 108–10 intersexuality 73, 80 Iraq 186–7 Irigaray, Luce 158 Islam 84–5, 120; see also Muslims Jackson, Stephanie 130, 160 Jakobson, Roman 28, 31, 143, 146 Jamaica 58 Jameson, Fredric 57, 65 Japan 60, 115, 154–5, 157 jazz 37, 40–1, 88, 106–7, 129, 157–61, 212–14; see also free jazz Jones, Alisha Lola 110 Jones, Nancy 193–4 Kabyle people 76–7 Kaluli people 36–7, 178–9, 222, 225 Kant, Immanuel 53, 92n9, 121, 205 Kapchan, Deborah 149, 178, 183–4 Karnatic music 191 Katz, Max 126, 182 Kawano, Kei 129 Keil, Charles 8–9, 58–9, 221–4, 227–8 Kenya 130, 132 Kim, Christine Sun 185 Kipling, Rudyard 116 Kisliuk, Michelle 154, 228 Korea 132, 191 Koskoff, Ellen 85–6 Kpelle people 10–11, 56, 209–11, 222 Krell, Elías 192 Kristeva, Julia 79, 158 Kubisch, Christina 179 Kuhn, Thomas 7–8 LaBelle, Brandon 189 Lacan, Jacques 78–9, 189–90, 208–9 language 26–30, 31–4, 35–41, 44–5, 78, 189–90; see also communication; sign languages; speech acts late capitalism 56, 66n5, 125, 159; see also capitalism; neoliberalism Latin America 60, 65, 101, 118, 129, 148 Latour, Bruno 196n11 León, Javier 57 Levin, Ted 180 Levinas, Emmanuel 208, 228 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 15, 29, 74, 208 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 220–1, 223, 228

240 Index Lewis, Bernard 120 Lewis, George 156–8, 160 LGBT issues 71–3, 88 Liberia 10–11, 56, 209 Liberian drum languages 35 linguistic anthropology 31–3, 36–7, 40, 45, 143–4, 146 linguistics 26–34, 36, 38, 42–3, 45, 78; see also semiotics; speech acts Lipsitz, George 160 listening 152, 158, 176–81, 183–7, 191–2, 225–7 lived experience 103, 109, 183, 194, 204–9, 214–15 Lomax, Alan 56, 63–4, 222 López, Francisco 179 Lorde, Audre 81 Luckmann, Thomas 10 Lysloff, René T. A. 124, 127 Madrid, Alejandro 141, 145, 149 Mahmood, Saba 84–5, 87 Mahon, Maureen 108–9 Malinowski, Bronislaw 151 Manuel, Peter 61–3, 65, 117 Marx, Karl 5–6, 51–2, 55–61, 65, 75, 114–15, 207 Marxism: approaches of 51–5; capitalism and 6, 55–7, 63–5, 115; feminism and 62; feudalism and 53–5; gender and 51, 57, 61–2; postcolonialism, globalization and 114–15, 124–5, 127; poststructuralism and 75–6; race and 104; socio-economic classes and 57–9; Western 102 masculinity 71, 109–10, 120, 153, 157, 191 masculinity studies 82–4 mass media see music industries Maus, Marcel 227–8 McGuiness, Andy 211 media studies 62, 196n5; see also music industries; technologies, sound Meintjes, Louise 87, 105 Meizel, Katherine 188, 194–5 MENA countries see Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 30, 119, 207, 211 Merriam, Alan 5, 8, 40, 176 metacommunication 37, 143 Meyer, Leonard 223, 225 middle class 55, 58, 73, 81, 128 Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) 120 Miller, Kiri 13, 183 Mills, Mara 185 modernity 51–2, 105, 116–21, 125–6, 132n4; Indigenous modernities 123; see also neoliberalism; post-modernism Molino, Jean 38–9 Monson, Ingrid 40–1, 107, 157, 164n5 Morcom, Anna 88–9 Morris, Jeremy Wade 63 multiculturalism 161 Muñoz, José Esteban 81, 153

music: capitalism and 63–5; critical improvisation studies and 155–9; deaf cultures and 194–5; in films 38, 61, 183; gender and 71, 74, 81–2, 84–91; globalization and 127–31; hegemony and 59–63; human fragility and 185–6; language and 35–41, 44–5, 189–90; linguistic theories and 26–30; listening to 183–5, 226–7; Marxism and 52–65; mass media and 62–3; participation and 221–7; performance studies and 144–9, 151, 153–5; phenomenology and 209–15; race and 40–1, 99, 105–10; semiotics and 35–45; socio-economic classes and 57–9; vs sound 176–7; sound and 177–81; technology and 128, 181–3; voice studies and 187–94; see also specific music genres music industries 37, 55–8, 60–5, 108–9, 115–16, 123–4, 127–31, 181–3, 215; see also digital technologies; technologies, sound musicking 225–6 Muslims 55, 89–90, 185; see also Islam Nancy, Jean-Luc 226 Nash, Jennifer 82 Native Americans 101 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 38–9, 44, 180 neoliberalism 56–7, 63, 65, 124–6 Nettl, Bruno 5, 71 Njaradi, Dunja 148 North Africa 90, 120 Novak, David 115–16, 176 Ochoa Gautier, Ana María 126, 181, 192–3, 226 Ohio music scenes 58, 211–15 Oliveros, Pauline 158–9, 184 orientalism 120, 154–5 Ortner, Sherry 74 Ottoman dance 89–90 Pan-Africanism 100–1, 161 Papua New Guinea 36, 109, 178, 222 participation 87, 183, 219; ethnomusicology and 222–4; listening and 226–7; musical processes and 224–6; philosophy and 219–21; politics and 221–2; powers and dangers of 227–8 participatory discrepancies (PDs) 8–9, 223, 229n16 Patel, Rupal 188 Pêcheux, Michael 80–1 Pedelty, Mark 180 Peirce, Charles Sanders 33–5, 38–41, 224 Peña, Manuel 58 performance: embodiment and 54, 76, 146, 149–50; ethnomusicology and 144–5; events 209–15; feminism and 145, 153, 158, 162; of gender 79–81, 88, 152–3; of identity 144–5, 191; of language 27; participatory 219, 221–2, 224, 227–8; studies 141–55 performance ethnography 13, 149–52

Index  241 performative ethnography 152–5 performativity 79–81, 143–4, 152–3, 158, 191; vs performance 106, 155, 163n2, 165n18; see also performance; speech acts Peru 61, 130 phenomenology 87, 122, 133n13, 183, 204–8, 209–15 Piekut, Benjamin 156 polka music 58–9 popular music 57, 60–4, 81, 128–30, 133n19, 144, 180, 211–15, 225; see also music industries; specific music genres Portugal 116, 126 post-colonialism 62, 76, 84, 110, 114–15, 117–23, 126–7, 131–2; see also colonialism; globalization post-modernism 18–19n1, 57, 65, 66n4, 153; see also late capitalism; neoliberalism poststructuralism 18–19n1, 71, 75–9, 83–4, 91, 92n14, 93n19, 104, 107, 120–2, 153, 208–9 Potter, John 193 Pozo, Chano 161 practice theory 54, 66n2, 105–7, 157, 206, 215; see also Bourdieu, Pierre; social practices proletariat 56, 58–9, 115; see also working class Protestantism 110 Puar, Jasmin 82 punk music 61, 81, 129–30, 153, 192 queer identity 71–2, 79–82, 105–6, 110, 153, 192 queer theory 79–82, 110, 145, 153, 164n8, 215 Qureshi, Regula 55 race: colonialism and 110; ethnomusicology and 105–10; music and 40–1, 87–8, 99, 155, 157, 160; theories of 61–2, 82, 100–5, 192–3, 208, 215; see also intersectionality Radano, Ronald 104–5 raga systems 35–6, 43 Rahaim, Matthew 191, 211, 228 Rahman, A. R. 42–4 Ramshaw, Sara 156 Rancier, Megan 180 recording industry see digital technologies; music industries; technologies, sound Reed, Daniel 115 religion 55, 90–1, 99, 132, 210, 220; see also Christianity; Islam; Muslims; Protestantism research methods 10–14, 20n12, 20n14; see also ethnography of performance; performance ethnography; performative ethnography Rice, Timothy 8, 12, 210–11 Ricoeur, Paul 207, 210 ritual 145, 147–8 rock music 15, 108–9, 128, 130, 194, 211–13 Rodenburg, Patsy 193 Romani people 89 Romero, Raúl 61 Rubin, Gayle 79 Russell, Bertrand 32, 209

Said, Edward 120, 155 Sakakeeny, Matt 106, 176 Samuels, David 179 Sartre, Jean-Paul 207–8 Saussure, Ferdinand de 16, 26–30, 33–4, 37, 40, 43 Savage, Roger 211 Schafer, R. Murray 147–8, 179 Schechner, Richard 141, 145, 147–9, 153 Schütz, Alfred 10, 207, 209–10, 222 Schwartz, Jessica 191 Seeger, Anthony xi, 144, 147, 184 Seeger, Charles xi, 5, 37 semiotics 33–4, 45, 88, 224, 227; Bollywood Film music and 42–4; music and 35–41 sexual continuum 73 sexuality 72–91, 158, 215 Shao, Oliver Y. 130–1 Shona people 223 sign languages 194–5 sign vehicles 33–4, 40 signing 195 signs: linguistic 26, 152; music and 35–40, 42–4; non-verbal 143; Peirce’s system of sign types 34, 224; systems of 27–8, 75, 78; thought and 33; see also semiotics Siisiäinen, Lauri 226 Silverstein, Michael 41 Singer, Milton 144 situated practice 35, 44, 141, 147, 155, 157, 163; see also practice theory Slaughter, Thomas F. 208 slavery 88, 90, 100–1, 117, 159, 192 Slobin, Mark 9 Small, Christopher 225 Smith, Julie Dawn 158 social aesthetics 156–7, 161 social interaction 31–2, 144, 206–8 social practices 76, 78, 110, 141–2, 154, 156, 163, 164n9, 180, 206; see also practice theory socio-economic class 57–9 Solis, Gabriel 109–10 Solomon, Thomas 114 sound studies 177–87 sound technologies see technologies, sound soundscape 36–8, 152, 177–81 South Africa 57, 59, 87, 101, 105, 126, 128 South Asia 63, 222 Spain 116 speech acts 32, 143, 152–3, 164n8 Spivak, Gayatri 80, 119, 121 Stanyek, Jason 157, 161, 182 Stein, Edith 206 Steinbock, Anthony 205 Steiner, Rudolf 221 Steingo, Gavin 57, 128 Sterne, Jonathan 177, 181–2, 184 Stirr, Anna 45 Stoever, Jennifer Lynn 192 Stokes, Martin 57

242 Index Stone, Ruth M. 10–12, 56, 209–11, 222 strategic essentialism 80, 121, 133n16 Straus, Joseph 184–5, 195 structural linguistics 26–30 structuralism 29, 35–7, 74, 208 Sugarman, Jane C. 54, 86, 89–90 Sundberg, Johann 188, 190 Tagaq, Tanya 193 Taylor, Charles 161 Taylor, Diana 145 Taylor, Timothy 57–8, 60, 115, 125–7 technologies, sound 13, 55, 61–3, 115, 124, 127–8, 152, 162, 178–9, 181–3, 194–5, 196n5; AUMI (adaptive use musical instrument) 159–60; for deaf hearing 195; see also digital technologies; music industries; popular music Thompson, Emily 181 throat singing 180 Titon, Jeff Todd 181, 210, 229n16 Titze, Ingo 188, 190 Tomlinson, John 125 Truax, Barry 179 Tucker, Sherrie 158–9 Turino, Thomas 39, 44, 64, 223–4, 227 Turkey 126, 185 Turnbull, Colin 148, 154, 178 Turner,Victor 145, 147–50, 222 United States 58, 101, 105, 107, 117, 192, 211–15

van Gennep, Arnold 145 voice studies 176–7, 187–96 Wallach, Jeremy 115, 128–30 Wallerstein, Immanuel 75, 116 Waterman, Ellen 147–8, 158, 161 Waxer, Lise 129 Weber, Max 207 Weidman, Amanda 126, 190–1 West Africa 56, 102 Westerkamp, Hildegard 179 Western art music 35–6, 39–40, 131, 134n26 Western Europe 56, 73, 78, 89 Western Marxism 102 whiteness studies 104, 192, 215 Williams, Raymond 52, 75, 102 Witek, Maria A. G. 227 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 32–3, 209 Wittig, Monique 79 women’s studies 72–4, 80 Wong, Deborah 106, 130, 142, 151–2, 154–5, 157, 176 working class 51–2, 58–60, 65, 72, 106, 160, 214; see also proletariat world music 115, 127–8, 150 Young, Iris Marion 208 Young, Miriama 182 Yuval-Davis, Nira 82 Zheng, Su 130 Zimbabwe 118, 223