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Hermeneutic Limits; or, When Not to Theorize: Notes for Interpreting Our Phoenix by Trans Indigenous Mexican-American Composer Mari Esabel Valverde
Abstract
Trans composers, like other people marginalized by race, gender, or sexuality, are often caught in the trap of identity constructs, which both envoice minorities and also pigeonhole their possible range of musical expression. In this essay on US-based transgender Indigenous Mexican choral composer Mari Esabel Valverde, I let my consideration of “trans music theory” be guided by her view that writers have sensationalized trans identity, and that while she celebrates trans lives in her choral work Our Phoenix (2016), she is not attempting to create music that “sounds” transgender. With Valverde in mind, I construct an intersectional interpretive framework that calls for various kind of limits (the limits of queering, of authorial subjectivity, and of the notion of “unconscious” expression of identity) and proposes essential conditions (the centrality of the voices, bodies, and musical structures of trans composers) that create an ethical environment for a compassionate trans music theory to emerge.
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An investigation of sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s, with detailed case studies of “electrosexual music” by a wide range of creators. In Sex Sounds, Danielle Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music's origin myth—that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively—Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies—examining music that ranges from Schaeffer's musique concrète to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle—Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the social and cultural impact sex has had on audible creative practices.
Sofer argues that “electrosexual music” has two central characteristics: the feminized voice and the “climax mechanism.” Sofer traces the historical fascination with electrified sex sounds, showing that works representing women's presumed sexual experience operate according to masculinist heterosexual tropes, and presenting examples that typify the electroacoustic sexual canon. Noting electronic music history's exclusion of works created by women, people of color, women of color, and, in particular Black artists, Sofer then analyzes musical examples that depart from and disrupt the electroacoustic norms, showing how even those that resist the norms sometimes reinforce them. These examples are drawn from categories of music that developed in parallel with conventional electroacoustic music, separated—segregated—from it. Sofer demonstrates that electrosexual music is far more representative than the typically presented electroacoustic canon.
This reflective article addresses current flashpoints around different/conflicting projections on decolonial music initiatives around the world, including conversational fronts in multiple, intersectional contexts. I speak first from my own positionality as a woman scholar-musician-educator of postcolonial and transnational Singaporean heritage working primarily in the UK as a member of a minority community: I recall surreal experiences of music education in Southeast/East Asia before examining more recent attempts to diversify music curricula and music representation in the UK. My perspectives are necessarily shot with privilege (Chinese, academic, institutional) as well as with continued, lived experiences of structural racisms – a term I use in the plural. I pose questions about musical choice, agency and personal boundaries in these ambiguous and fraught spaces – increasingly recalibrated in new ways by social media and shifting global tectonic plates platforming the rise of East Asia (particularly, China) as a source of economic and musical opportunity. Here, understandings of intersectionality crucial, where the highlighting of perspectives from the Global South alongside new configurations of the Global North have also become necessary alongside considerations of academic privilege and aspirational cosmopolitanism.
Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.
Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth. Using minority stress theory and the interpersonal theory of suicide, this study aims to better understand suicide risk among transgender youth. The present study examines the influence of intervenable risk factors: interpersonal and environmental microaggressions, internalized self-stigma, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and protective factors: school belonging, family support, and peer support on both lifetime suicide attempts and past 6-month suicidality in a sample of transgender youth (n = 372). SPSS 22 was utilized to examine the impact of the independent variables on both suicidality and lifetime suicide attempt through two separate logistic regressions. Fifty six percent of youth reported a previous suicide attempt and 86% reported suicidality. Logistic regressions indicated that models for both lifetime suicide attempts and suicidality were significant. Interpersonal microaggressions, made a unique, statistically significant contribution to lifetime suicide attempts and emotional neglect by family approached significance. School belonging, emotional neglect by family, and internalized self-stigma made a unique, statistically significant contribution to past 6-month suicidality. Results have significant practice and policy implications. Findings offer guidance for practitioners working with parents and caregivers of trans youth, as well as, for the creation of practices which foster interpersonal belonging for transgender youth.
Situated in the context of current examinations of academic disciplinarity, this article contributes to the decades-long discussions (or debates) regarding the status of ethnomusicology, arguing forcefully for the (sub-)discipline’s cessation. A focus on ethnomusicology’s very prefix, “ethn-”, exposes the field’s historical and continuing reliance upon colonialist ideology, continually reproduced in relation to both ethnicity (constructed in relation to interrelated discourses of authenticity, technology, and gender) and ethnography. Highlighting the extent to which a field-defining ideological-methodological matrix has led to the production of a theoretical narrowness predicated upon and engendering the construction of “Others,” it is commitment to inter-, trans-, or post-disciplinarity (rather than disciplinary dogmatism) that is shown to promise a vital and relevant space for explorations of sound and music within current and future university spaces. Ultimately, given the inherent restrictions and limitations suggested by prefixes or qualifiers of any sort, it is the appellation musicology that may best serve as a (provisional) marker for interdisciplinary inquiry, its very re-appropriation (from its own historical circumscriptions) serving as an act rife with symbolic significance.
This article presents an overview of the first AI-human collaborated album, Hello World, by SKYGGE, which utilizes Sony’s Flow Machines technologies. This case study is situated within a review of current and emerging uses of AI in popular music production, and connects those uses with myths and fears that have circulated in discourses concerning the use of AI in general, and how these fears connect to the idea of an audio uncanny valley. By proposing the concept of an audio uncanny valley in relation to AIPM (artificial intelligence popular music), this article offers a lens through which to examine the more novel and unusual melodies and harmonization made possible through AI music generation, and questions how this content relates to wider speculations about posthumanism, sincerity, and authenticity in both popular music, and broader assumptions of anthropocentric creativity. In its documentation of the emergence of a new era of popular music, the AI era, this article surveys: (1) The current landscape of artificial intelligence popular music focusing on the use of Markov models for generative purposes; (2) posthumanist creativity and the potential for an audio uncanny valley; and (3) issues of perceived authenticity in the technologically mediated “voice”.
Fondazione Giorgio Cini Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi
Venezia Fondazione Giorgio Cini 2016
Fulgeat sol frontis decorae
Studi in onore di Michael Talbot a cura di Alessandro Borin e Jasmin Melissa Cameron
Popular music has always been a dynamic mediator of gender and sexuality, and a productive site of rebellion, oddity and queerness. The transformative Capacity of music-making, performance and consumption helps us to make sense of identity and allows us to glimpse otherworldliness, arousing the political imagination. With an activist voice that is impassioned yet adherent to scholarly rigour, Playing it Queer provides an original and compelling ethnographic account of the relationship between popular music, queer self-fashioning and (sub)cultural world-making.
This book begins with a comprehensive survey and critical evaluation of relevant literatures on queer identity and political debates as well as popular music, identity and (sub)cultural style. Contextualised within a detailed history of queer sensibilities and creative practices, including camp, drag, genderfuck, queercore, feminist music and club cultures, the author's rich empirical studies of local performers and translocal scenes intimately capture the meaning and value of popular musics and (sub)cultural style in everyday queer lives.
Recent years have witnessed a general backlash against identity politics, both in the academy and the public sphere. This paper recognises the problems in identity politics as arising from an apparent difficulty in conceptualising identity separately from notions of fixity and exclusion. It argues that politicised identities could, instead, be premised upon an explicit affirmation of the provisionality of political identity that is oriented to a “tomorrow “ in which the identity will no longer be required.
Although there is scarcely more than a mention of homosexuality in his scholarly writings, Michael Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, has become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? Offering a no-holds barred rebuke to recent criticism of Foucault by Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, biographer James Miller, and others, Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defence of the late French philosopher and historian. A sometimes scathing, sometimes moving exploration of truth and sexual politics, it shows Foucault as a galvanizing thinker who will continue to serve as a model for gay intellectuals and activists.
The past two decades have seen the incursion of feminist thought into many academic areas. Within the academy, feminist approaches have gained some legitimacy and yet, simultaneous with these disciplinary advances, there have been charges of racism directed at feminist scholarship and practice. These charges have resulted in feminist work continuously reshaping itself. This volume represents the strength as well as diversity of writings which discuss 'race' and feminism showing how these two areas, usually considered to be distinct and therefore discrete from each other, have developed. Feminism and Race includes articles spanning a number of disciplinary areas, such as history, literary analysis, sociology, and psychology and provides a history of how second wave feminisms have negotiated 'race' as well as suggesting what future directions these debates may take.
In the 1990s, academic study of LGBTQ issues in relation to music centered on classical music, and the research topics and researchers were mostly white. The scope of the field has expanded greatly since then, with ongoing research on classical music, extensive work on white popular music, a growing literature on Black music, and recent initiatives in ethnomusicology. The term “queer” has risen as a welcome intention of inclusiveness, along with some complexity in its meanings. In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, contributors choose their relationship to the term as it relates to their work within and without the academic community. Offering a decisive departure from a Western- and Eurocentric approach to music, this Handbook reflects different rhetorics of queer musicology. Chapters look at music and queer experience across a range of venues and approaches, from gospel to electronic dance music; from Hong Kong public music to Ukrainian pop. Together, contributors illustrate the potential of queer methodologies in the musical realm, and where we go from here.
This essay uses analytical sketches of Indigenous DJ collective A Tribe Called Red’s “How I Feel” as a starting point for critiquing the white colonial Eurocentric norms of music analysis as currently practiced in the discipline of music theory. I expand on previous calls for greater diversity and inclusion within the field by exposing colonial and Eurocentric analytical strategies. I then propose some possibilities for decolonizing and Indigenizing music analysis that reflect individuals’ differing capacities for growth and change while also challenging music analysts to move beyond tokenistic gestures.
Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition is an interdisciplinary of work of critically engaged political theory that traverses the fields of political science and Indigenous studies. The arguments developed in the book draw critically from both Western and Indigenous traditions of political thought and action to intervene into contemporary debates about settler-colonization and Indigenous self-discrimination in Canada. The book challenges the now commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state can be “reconciled” via such a politics of recognition. It also explores glimpses of an alternative Indigenous politics. Drawing critically from Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and activist traditions, the book explores a resurgent Indigenous politics that is less orientated around attaining an affirmative form of recognition and institutional accommodation by the colonial state and society, and more about critically revaluing, reconstructing and redeploying Indigenous cultural practices in ways that seek to prefigure radical alternative to the social relationships that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.
For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in terms of the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this paper, a critical-race examination of the field of music theory, I try to come to terms with why this is so. I posit that there exists a “white racial frame” in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory.
This book is the first full-length biography to be written about the American composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos (b. 1939). With her debut album, Switched-On Bach , Carlos brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners. She not only blazed new trails in electronic music for decades but also intersected with many aspects of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Her story features an eclectic cast of characters, including Arthur Bell, Leonard Bernstein, Allan Kozinn, the Kronos Quartet, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Moog, Ron Nelson, Stevie Wonder, and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Carlos’s identity as a transgender woman has shaped many aspects of her life, her career, how she relates to the public, and how the public has received her and her music. Cultural factors surrounding the treatment of transgender people affected many decisions that Carlos has made over the decades. She remained in hiding for more than a decade after she transitioned to female because she feared for her personal safety and professional reputation. Once she disclosed her transition publicly, many journalists and fans began to focus almost exclusively on her gender instead of on her music. Eventually she retreated again, giving very few interviews and never speaking about her gender on record. The fact that she is transgender is just one dimension of her story, however. This text presents her life as completely as is currently possible and relates her life to many dimensions of American culture.
Intercultural composition materialized at a time during which Euro-American social and artistic values transformed into a force ofglobalization. Such a force profoundly impacted on political, educational and artistic institutions in East Asia and helped shape perceptions of the relationship between the domestic and the foreign which have continued into the twenty-first century. China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan share something: A general acceptance of "Western" music as the basis of contemporary musical development and change. Perhaps the most defining element of this affinity is the "interculturality" seemingly inexorable to the very concept of contemporary composition. Despite the wholesale acceptance of European art music as "modern " music in the mid-twentieth century, artists in these East Asian countries simultaneously acknowledge the importance of traditional music to the identity of a modern nation. Acknowledged, as well, is the somewhat marginal status these music traditions have held within rapidly developing twentieth- and twenty-first-century societies. Caught between the rhetoric of national representation and long-established cultural and racial power discrepancies, many East Asian composers embody a lim- inality in international composition: perennially marked by foreignness on the one hand, and labeled a vehicle for progressive national culture on the other. Insider/ outsider dichotomies have remainedfoundational to the reception and interpretation of compositions by non-European, non-U.S.-American composers in the new millennium. An increasing number of composers, performers and educators have turned to the music expressivities of East Asian countries such as China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan for artistic partnerships. Thus, issues of identity, authenticity, ownership and culture have become more complicated. The articles in this issue explore constructs of interculturality in the East Asian context. By examining the particularities of nation, genre, musical roots and composer identity, each paper both explores and questions the validity of the interculturality construct. The contributors to this issue aim to re-appropriate the notion of interculturality by exploring the nuances of East Asian compositional perspectives. © 2017 VWB - Verlag fuer Wissenschaft und Bildung. All rights reserved.
Building on an implicit ethical critique of music theory in the writings of Marion A. Guck and other feminist music theorists, this paper seeks to displace an implicit moral commitment that pervades music-theoretical practice in favor of an ethics in the Deleuzian sense of the term. First, I demonstrate how established music-theoretical approaches remain focused on defining and policing a musical morality - a strict delineation of what ought to count as proper ways of doing music theory, of lovingly engaging with music professionally. Second, taking up Guck's call for an open-ended and diverse disciplinary ethics centered on music loving, I explore how the Deleuzian ethical concept of love as a positive and productive force might intervene in our discipline's moralistic investments and facilitate the creation of new feminist music-theoretical concepts and practices.
This chapter presents a review of the essay “Schenker's Conception of Musical Structure,” written by Allen Forte. The essay comments on a graphic analysis presented by Heinrich Schenker and exemplifies his approach towards tonal music. The music theorist in Forte's essay is conspicuously a writer, who seeks to dispose the words of the essay in the allotted time or space, imagines a time outside the span of the essay and an encounter with a diverse world in which incomprehension is possible. Beyond making assertions about musical structure, the essay also mimics procedures of Schenkerian musical structure and musical theory. Forte's language in the essay also creates parallels between music and theoretical discourse apart from more general resemblance between the musical theorist and the composition in the essay. He also refers to the discipline of music theory and evokes a coherent, purposeful area of research at a time when the present institutional structures of music theory didn't exist.
“TransAmericana” describes a contemporary sociomusical phenomenon of transgender and queerly gendered musicians who have chosen American roots genres including country and folk as their expressive material. This combination of gender and genre may seem unexpected. Roots functions through assertions of authenticity and sincerity, framing itself as a simple and historical music “of the people.” Meanwhile, biased views of transgender people assume deceit, while radical queer voices tend to be heard via genres linked to rebellion or camp. Yet several of these musicians have come to their gender and genre identifications simultaneously, describing a cogenerative relationship. My essay argues that assumptions of normative identity in Americana music make it an attractive and powerful musical space for transgender and queerly gendered artists to play with both the sociomusical identifications around Americana and expectations of “the transgender narrative.”
In her book The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism, Briony Fer considers the dramatic changes to “the map of art” in the 1950s and characterizes the transition away from modernism not as a negation, but as a positive reconfiguration. In examining works from the 1950s and 1960s by visual artists including Piero Manzoni, Eva Hesse, Dan Flavin, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, and Louise Bourgeois, Fer suggests that after a modernist aesthetic was exhausted by mid-century, there emerged “strategies of remaking art through repetition,” with a shift from a collage aesthetic to a serial one; by “serial,” she means “a number of connected elements with a common strand linking them together, often repetitively, often in succession.” Although Fer’s use of the term “serial” in visual art differs from that typically employed in discussions about music, her fundamental claim that “seriality and subjectivity are inextricably bound” is fruitful in thinking about the music of Julius Eastman (1940–90). Her discussion of Hesse’s approach to serial repetition as an art that was “personal” resonates with my understanding of Eastman’s compositional use of repetition, a process that permits a gradual unfolding of the deliberately politicized sonic field. This politicization is suggested by the titles of some of his untexted compositions, which can redirect one’s hearing in specific ways. For example, the title of his haunting Gay Guerrilla (1980) invites the listener to engage with a complex set of issues regarding sexuality and politics, a listening experience that is enhanced when we consider Eastman’s music in relation to his life as a gay African American who walked on the edges of the American new music scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
Framing opera as a collaborative genre compels an examination of differences. In particular, opera's media may be understood as simultaneous but not necessarily as cooperative or neutral. This conception of opera raises issues of power dynamics and the politics of voice, both within the work and among its artists. In Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, musico-dramatic dissonances center on the protagonist's homoerotic obsession with a young boy. His momentous “I love you” at the end of the act 1 finale is accompanied by a musical gesture that does not affirm but rather resists this coming-out event. The gesture's subsequent transformations in other passages that contain no text, and two years later in Britten's Third String Quartet, reinforce the sense of musical opposition to the libretto's homosexual trajectory—a trajectory that results in the protagonist's shame and untimely death.
If musical detachment from the libretto suggests subtext, then it also points to alternative voices. Britten's homosexuality, and the pressures that accumulated around sexual identity in postwar England, argue for connections between musical distance and closeted discourse. Analysis must acknowledge the role of the composer's experiences in the varying characterizations of the protagonist but must also cope with the limits to this type of investigation: The attempt to draw definitive connections between music and sexuality limits the suppleness of our critical apparatus. Conceiving of opera as collaboration prompts a reevaluation of the work as potentially contradictory and fragmented but also advocates against the resolution of such contradictions into coherent authorial statements. Collaboration dislodges autonomy and unity and in their place recommends polyphonies—of authors and voices, among media but also within them.
Whether understood as the elevation of material to a higher state of aesthetic being or the redirection of the libido toward socially seemly ends, the concept of sublimation has played a central but underappreciated role in accounts of Ravel and his music over the past century Similarly, Ravel's identity as a dandy-who, according to Baudelaire, aspires to be "sublime without interruption" -has been mentioned consistently in biographical appraisals, but never deeply investigated. Incorporating a representation of the dandy's genesis from the sublimation of desire, Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe (1909-1912) offers the analyst an excellent opportunity to examine both entities in depth while also broaching a variety of related topics: repression, queer sexuality, camp aesthetics, contemporary musical politics (dandyism versus d'Indyism), and theories of autobiography.
This article considers a number of Tchaikovsky's songs - specifically those with texts by Apukhtin, Romanov, Heine, Goethe, and Tchaikovsky himself - to explore how silence constitutes a powerful yet elusive form of expression. It argues that Tchaikovsky's songs, an underappreciated and underexplored aspect of his output (at least in the West), are characterized by a degree of literary and musical sophistication seldom attributed to the composer. Their self-consciousness is held to be the product of a combination of three main social and aesthetic forces characteristic of Russian culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Drawing first on the work of Bakhtin, the article argues that the nature of Tchaikovsky's songs as lyric forms in an age dominated by the realist novel invests them with a creative tension between the need to conceal (an imperative inherited from the lyric poetry of the 1820s and 1830s) and the need to reveal (a feature of the novel's tendency to intimacy and confession). Then, turning to the work of Foucault, it traces how a coherent discourse of homosexual identity (as opposed to an otherwise unrelated series of individual homosexual acts) arose in the later nineteenth century, forcing queer artists to address (whether consciously or otherwise) the question of how best to relate this identity to their creativity. Finally, it looks at the evolving status of the artist in late Imperial Russia and suggests that an uneasy relationship between revealing and concealing was imposed upon personalities in the public eye by an audience that wished to feel close to the artist, yet also required discretion and the avoidance of scandal. At the heart of the article lies a study of silence as a particularly expressive form of apparent non-expression, dealing with frequent instances in Tchaikovsky's songs of silence as a poetic trope, as well as with equivocation on matters of gender and identity in lyric forms as indicative of a potentially queer sensibility. Also, the article refuses to reimpose a categorically and reductively homosexual reading, posited on some presumed opposed heterosexual norm. Rather, it argues that Tchaikovsky was able to discern the peculiar appeal of lyric forms as referentially incomplete yet aesthetically self-sufficient fragments, and that he approached such lyrics in a way that emphasized qualities of ambiguity, allusion, and the uncanny. Although drawing extensively on literary models, the article also considers how music is paradoxically well placed to enact poetic silence. The relationship between words and music, and between composition, performance, and reception, is a further instance of how song became an apt medium in which the thoughtful composer could explore issues of personal and creative identity in an age of profound artistic and social transformation.
Social Text 20.2 (2002) 21-47
—Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada
—Zapp, "It Doesn't Really Matter"
This essay takes up N. Katherine Hayles's challenge to seize this critical moment in order "to contest what the posthuman means . . . before the trains of thought it embodies have been laid down so firmly that it would take dynamite to change them," by closely examining her recent text, How We Became Posthuman. I do this because Hayles's volume provides the most elaborate history and theory of the posthuman, even while her framework embodies the "trains of thought" she herself queries. In other words, Hayles's own formulations are on the way to becoming hegemonic, at least in the discrepant disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that make up the postdiscipline of cultural studies. I begin with two contentions. The first concerns the literal and virtual whiteness of cybertheory. The second establishes at the very least an aporetic relationship between New World black cultures and the category of the "human." In addition, this essay also seeks to realign the hegemony of visual media in academic considerations of virtuality by shifting the emphasis to the aural, allowing us to conjecture some of the manifold ways in which black cultural production engages with informational technologies.
This is followed by a discussion of the distinct status of the "human" in Afro-diasporic politico-cultural formations. Then my attention turns to the foremost theorist of a specifically black posthumanity: the British music and cultural critic Kodwo Eshun. Eshun's work provides an occasion to imagine alternative stagings of the human and posthuman found in the crosscurrents and discontinuities marking the history of African American music and the informational technologies in which they have been embodied over the course of the twentieth century. To this end, my focus will be on the role of the vocoder, a speech-synthesizing device that renders the human voice robotic, in R&B, since the audibly machinic black voice amplifies the vexed interstices of race, sound, and technology. In contrast to other forms of black popular music (jazz or hip hop, for instance), R&B, especially current manifestations of this genre, has received little critical attention. I would like to amend this neglect by insisting on the genre's importance as a pivotal space for the coarticulation of black subjectivity and information technologies. The interaction between the audibly mechanized and more traditionally melismatic and "soulful" voice in contemporary R&B indicates a different form of posthumanism than the one suggested by cybertheory, a posthumanism not mired in the residual effects of white liberal subjectivity, and a subjectivity located in the sonic arena rather than the ocular.
It is obviously nothing new to declare that cybertheory has little if anything to say about the intricate processes of racial formation, whether U.S.-based or within a more global framework. While gender and sexuality have been crucial to theories of both cyberspace and the posthuman, the absence of race is usually perfunctorily remarked and of little consequence to these analyses. Critics such as Joe Lockard and Kalí Tal have dealt with the erasure of race from these studies, but their work remains ghettoized rather than integrated into the mainstream of cybertheory. Hayles is no exception in this regard: while gender takes center stage in much of Hayles's discussion of these cultural and technological constellations, her analysis...
Really? I asked the editors. You really want me to review Susan McClary right after she reviewed me in these very pages? You’re willing to risk the sort of spectacle in which, say, Joseph Kerman and Charles Rosen hand the palm back and forth in The New York Review of Each Other’s Books? Don’t you know that is how one loses one’s clout?
Oh yes, we’ll risk it, they replied, and I am glad. What Susan handed me was not exactly a palm, although there were fronds amid the brambles. And as the editors evidently expected, what I am about to hand back will not exactly be a palm either, although I do intend it as a token of admiration. It is no secret that Susan and I are old acquaintances—old friends, even—united in what I trust are resilient bonds of affection. Those bonds have never constrained our free exchange of often critical opinion; and as long as she has made hers public in a decidedly mixed review of my Oxford History of Western Music, I am happy to follow suit now that she has been honoured by Ashgate with a collection of reissued essays called Reading Music1—one in a series, Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology, that also includes volumes devoted to the writings of Lawrence Kramer, Gary Tomlinson, Simon Frith, and Nicholas Cook—and also with a Festschrift called Musicological Identities (2008),2 assembled and edited by Raymond Knapp, her UCLA colleague, and her former pupils Steven Baur and Jacqueline Warwick. This pair of tributes invites a comprehensive stocktaking of McClary’s achievement and impact.
But first, a harsh complaint: The words ‘honoured’ and ‘tributes’ above really belong in scare quotes, so cheesy is Ashgate’s presentation, especially of the retrospective collection, photographically reproduced from the original publications so that it amounts to a measly course reader between hard covers at a grotesquely inflated price. Redundancies (in one case a two-page block incorporating three citations from sources) are unpruned; typefaces and editorial policies clash; ‘rarefied’ is spelled correctly in one piece, as ‘rarified’ in another. Endnotes are a special disgrace, with fragments of unincluded items negligently reproduced (couldn’t they at least have been covered up when xeroxing?). Most infuriating of all, the penultimate essay in the collection, corresponding to the opening chapter of McClary’s most recent book, the prize-winning Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley, 2004), consists in the main of a very close modal and tropological analysis of Ah, dolente partita from Monteverdi’s Fourth Book of madrigals. The original publication, by the University of California Press, carried the full score as a most necessary appendix. The score is absent from the reprint, rendering futile any attempt to follow the dissection. I really don’t understand why McClary accepted such insulting terms. By now MacArthured, Kinkeldeyed, and Festschrifted, she could have proposed this collection to practically any academic house—yes, even now—as a prestige publication, and could have expected an elegant, newly redacted presentation in a uniform style. She has earned it. If she submitted to Ashgate’s mistreatment for the sake of solidarity with her fellows in their series, it was a gallant but unwarranted sacrifice. She has ascended to a stature far above theirs.
She has done this by dint of the sheer multifariousness of her output and influence, something that must inspire wonder in any observer. Surely McClary has broken all records for musicological versatility. In Reading Music (the title chosen, I presume, to emphasize her conspicuous role in the resurgence of musical hermeneutics that was the signal musicological event of the 1980s) she has selected and arranged the contents in four groups: ‘Interpretation and Polemics’, ‘Gender and Sexuality’, ‘Popular Music’, and ‘Early Music’. The first is devoted to her notorious early publications: calculatedly strident demands, dating between 1983 and 1993, that music be re-correlated with the history of ideas, but on a new footing that reflected not amiable nineteenth-century Geistesgeschichte but contentious twentieth-century cultural studies. Beginning with her very first article, ‘Pitches, Expression, Ideology: An Exercise in Mediation’, a piece (included, as the...
In an examination of the psychological aspect of passing, this essay challenges Sandy Stone's conceptualization and subsequent request for transsexuals to forego the act. Employing an auto-ethnographical approach, this essay contends that considering the “psychic” dimensions of passing requires different, and more hopeful, articulations about transsexual bodies, such that gendered and racialized transsexual bodies are produced not simply in terms of social reading and physical embodiment, but also through psychic affirmation and disavowal.
From Beyoncé's Metropolis-suit at the 2007 BET Awards1 to critic Tom Breihan's identification of a subgenre of “robo-diva” R&B performers (including Ciara and Rihanna),2 there are a number of black female R&B singers who present themselves—intentionally or unintentionally—as non-“human.” What is at stake, politically and aesthetically, in black women presenting themselves as robots? There is more at work here, I think, than a simple reaction to the stereotype about black women and “nature.” Looking to Beyoncé's BET Awards performance and Rihanna's “Umbrella” video, I argue that the figure of the robo-diva: (1) evinces a tendency in white patriarchy to express its anxieties about technology in terms of black female sexuality, and vice versa; and (2) in critiquing the race–gender politics of mainstream Anglo-American popular music aesthetics, deconstructs many of its values (e.g., personal and cultural authenticity, expressivity, virtuosity).
In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.