MPSG Online - Music, "Art" and the White Racial Frame

The MPSG Committee comprises:Férdia Stone-Davis, ChairD﻿ominik R. Mitterer, SecretarySamuel Wilson, Events CoordinatorFriedlind Riedel, CommunicationsAlexander Douglas , EDI and CommunicationsAndrew Huddleston, TreasurerNaomi Waltham-Smith, Advisory MemberMartin Stokes, Senior Advisory MemberDerek Matravers, Senior Advisory Member

RMA MPSG Committee

Alexander Douglas will convene a session on "Music, 'Art' and  the White Racial Frame: Aesthetics and Critical Race Theory"

Since the firestorm we know as #Schenkergate erupted, academic music studies have been forced to reckon with the way Philip Ewell has appropriated Joe Feagin’s concept of the ‘white racial frame’. The starting point for this session is the understanding that the field of music philosophy can legitimately be charged with operating through such a frame. A major role is played here by the concept of music – or that music which is considered worthy of (philosophical-aesthetic) theorization – as ‘art’, to whose ‘dignity’, claimed the musicologist and white supremacist François-Joseph Fétis in 1869, ‘no music has been elevated…apart from among peoples of the white race’. As such, ‘art music’ co-exists alongside the concept of a ‘musical work’, and therefore music as ‘property’, existing within what critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has called an ‘entangled relationship’ with the history of whiteness; but also concepts of music as ‘symbol’, differently articulated by, say, Susanne Langer and Nelson Goodman – a symbol needing to be interpreted or ‘understood’ (not least by those in positions of epistemic authority); as well as persistent interpretations of art as ‘technique’ subject to historicist teleological imperatives of technical ‘progress’. In sum, what is the concept of ‘art’ when considered against the background of racial ideologies, structures and histories, and what is its usefulness to our understanding of music as both ontological entity and lived experience, inside and outside the West?

Jessie Cox and Isaac Jean-François
 - Breathing Musically: Aesthetics of (Black) Breathing 

The entanglement of breathing, from past into future spaces and its inverse smooth operations, is what shifts a musical opening to a place of altered destiny. With black and brown life cornered into visible places of anti-black state violence, we hope to explore how (Black) breathing is channeled into/through an instrument, making it musical,—an archive is sounded, and possible futures are opened.

In this paper we consider the act of breathing, and particularly the act of breathing as transposed by being while Black, in relation to music, musicality, musical instruments, and musical actants. Music appears through the sounding of what was, and what could be(come) and we attend to acts of breathing that complicate easy listening. What was is encoded in the musical instrument as tertiary retention, what is is sounded through the instruments’ intra-active existence with what is probed and the subject who expects a certain probe, what could be is in the instrument, of course also the necessity of protentions for tertiary retentions, but also through the cracks, or the unknown, of instrumental wholeness.

Is Black breathing (and/or sounding) beautiful? This is one of the questions asked when a Black musical performance is interpreted. Black breathing is an aesthetical question. When George Bridgetower is removed from the title of the piece dedicated to him, the now titled “Kreutzer Sonate,” then those attempting to wipe the archive are attempting to close a Black breathing. Here the question arises: is Black breathing still in this piece as a sort of hauntology through the composer’s hearing/imagining of Black breathing/liveness? Is the sound of Ma Rainey’s “Slow Driving Moan’,” or the sound of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, extricable from Black breathing?

We investigate these sites of musical mattering through the question posed by breathing. As invoked, this listening to (Black) breathing resounds, in a blurry and silencing way, the material, technological, aesthetical and ontological, sounding in music.

Charissa Granger
 - The Politics of Pleasure in Steelband’s Decolonial Aesthetic

Steelband music, specifically the practice of performing Western art-music on the instrument, is considered by Shannon Dudley as both an accommodation of colonial hegemony, thereby illustrating sophistication, and as resistance, for its practice of resignifying. Additionally, he argues for understanding and critically exploring aesthetic pleasure as an interpretive stance in relation to steelband (Dudley 2008, 119-29). 
Engaged in colonial undoing, steelband music redefines the social, political, and economic status quo through its arrangements and performances by creating a counter-narrative. Mignolo, together with other decolonial scholars asked what the place of aesthetics was in the colonial matrix. According to Rolando Vásquez:
“Decolonial Aesthetics/Aesthesis seeks to bring to the fore those other forms of sensing and inhabiting the world that have been subsumed under the long history of this Western-centered world, of the modern/colonial order […] decolonial artists are not seeking innovation and abstraction for the sake of it, they are not seeking the recognition of the contemporary art world; rather, they are bringing to light through their practices, through their bodies and communities the histories that have been denied, the forms of sensing and inhabiting the world that have been disdained or erased” (Lockward, 2017, 105-6.)
This paper explores musical arrangement in steelband performance through a discussion of a decolonial aesthetics and pleasure.


AJ Kluth 
- Decolonizing Ontological and Epistemological Assumptions of Institutional Music Study

As a concept, admonition, and mandate, decolonization is finally finding itself a topic of discussion in the halls of institutional music study. The boundaries and demands of whatever decolonization might mean, however, are unclear. In the marketplace of musical production and distribution, issues that beg a decolonizing intervention are relatively easier to spot; i.e. access and exposure, performance, and “consumption.” But, as manifest in institutional music study, effective responses to calls for decolonization may be trickier. It has been argued that the university is an artifact of colonial logic engaged in authorizing and reifying heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. Scandals like Schenkergate of summer 2020 and accusations of white supremacy in the Society for Ethnomusicology call this out and demand moves toward the decolonization of institutional music study. “Decolonizing” syllabi is important, as is the decentering of whiteness in terms of the privilege heretofore enjoyed by the canon of Euro-American art music and its attendant theoretical models. But I suggest these incremental moves do little to address the assumptions upon which the white racial frame of institutional music study was built and is reproduced. This paper asks what it might mean to decolonize music study by considering the framings that presuppose our “object” of study, specifically with regard to ontological and epistemological conceits. These include: the work concept, being vs. becoming, undecidability, the limits of notation to frame the communication of musical experience, etc. By interrogating previous assumptions, we are led to ask not only what music might be, but also what the university and music degrees are for; to interrogate the type of knowledge and value production in which we are engaged.

We thank the Margaret Beaufort Institute, Cambridge, for the use of their Zoom account to host this series. If you have any questions, please email Hannah at hannahcapstickmusic@gmail.com or Matthew at m.pritchard1@leeds.ac.uk.

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