Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:55:43.497Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

OF BODY, OF EMOTION: A TOOLKIT FOR TRANSFORMATIVE SOUND USE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2020

Shoshana Rosenberg  and
Hannah Reardon-Smith
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Much of contemporary western art music relies on objectivist and individualistic frameworks of intellect which oppose any focus on subjectivity, embodiment or emotion. These approaches deny composers, players and audiences the powerful experiences facilitated by works which are of body and of emotion. We suggest that by facilitating a return to body and emotion in sound we create potential for deep, cathartic, and transformative psychophysiological states. We argue that these states can create shared experiences that directly resist the isolating, homogenising, socially apathetic and narrowing path paved by frameworks of intellect. This refusal can facilitate collectivised movement towards an ethics of care, through mutuality, solidarity and empathy. This extends further than musical practice and builds potential inroads towards greater social and political transformation. We offer a toolkit of actions and frameworks that enable embodied and emotional sound use: intensity, stillness, improvisation, collectivised praxis and uncanoning.

Type
RESEARCH ARTICLES
Information
Tempo , Volume 74 , Issue 292 , April 2020 , pp. 64 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Smith, Julie Dawn, quoted in Siddall, Gillian and Waterman, Ellen, ‘Introduction: Improvising at the Nexus of Discursive and Material Bodies’, in Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, ed. Siddall, Gillian and Waterman, Ellen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 2Google Scholar.

2 Moreland, J.P., Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018)Google Scholar.

3 Best, Joel, ed., Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), pp. 3–16Google Scholar.

4 Palacios, Margarita, Radical Sociality: On Disobedience, Violence and Belonging (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Connell, R.W., Masculinities (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005)Google Scholar; Harding, Sandra, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Lykke, Nina, ‘Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience: Portrait of an Implosion’, in Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology, ed. Smelik, Anneke and Lykke, Nina (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Roughgarden, Joan, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Warner, Michael, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

6 Johnson, Mark, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

7 Warner, The Trouble with Normal.

8 Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

9 Sara Ahmed, ‘Uses of Use – Diversity, Utility and the University’, 5 March 2018, on CRASSH Cambridge, www.youtube.com/watch?v=avKJ2w1mhng (accessed 8 September 2019).

10 DeLorenzo, Lisa C., Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice in the Classroom (New York: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar.

11 Small, Christopher, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), p. 9Google Scholar.

12 Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Galas, Diamanda, quoted in Juno, Andrea, Angry Women (New York: Juno Books, 1999), p. 13Google Scholar.

14 Adorno, Theodor W., Essays on Music, selected by Richard Leppert, trans. Gillespie, Susan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Donin, Nicolas, ‘Artistic Research and the Creative Process: The Joys and Perils of Self-Analysis’, in Patterns of Intuition: Musical Creativity in the Light of Algorithmic Composition, ed. Nierhaus, Gerhard (New York: Springer, 2015)Google Scholar; Maus, Fred Everett, ‘Masculine Discourse in Music Theory’, in Music and Identity Politics, ed. Biddle, Ian (Oxon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 63–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Hesmondhalgh, David, Why Music Matters (Maldon, MA: Wiley, 2013)Google Scholar.

16 Bannister, Matthew, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)Google Scholar; Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David, ‘Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music’, in Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Macarthur, Sally, ‘The Woman Composer, New Music and Neoliberalism’, Musicology Australia 36/1 (2014), pp. 36–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stannard, Iain, ‘Hermaphrodism and the Masculine Body: Tippett's Aesthetic Views in a Gendered Context’, in Masculinity and Western Musical Practice, Ian Biddle and Kristen Gibson (Oxon: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar.

17 Frederickson, Kristen and Webb, Sarah E., eds, Singular Women: Writing the Artist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 229Google Scholar; Halberstam, Jack, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Boise, Sam de, Men, Masculinity, Music and Emotions (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 1–21Google Scholar.

19 McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 4Google Scholar.

20 Candlin, Christopher N. and Crichton, Jonathan, eds, Discourses of Deficit (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010)Google Scholar.

21 Cusick, Suzanne G., ‘Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem’, in Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic: Essay, ed. Krims, Adam (Berlin: G + B Arts International, 1998), p. 42Google Scholar.

22 Ashby, Arved, Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meyer, Leonard B., Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

23 Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Stefano, Christine Di, ‘Introduction: Revision, Reconstruction, and the Challenge of the New’, in Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, ed. Hirschmann, Nancy J. and Di Stefano, Christine (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Jourdain, Robert, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures our Imagination (New York: William Morrow, 2008), 120–54Google Scholar.

25 Anderson, Ben, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society 2/2 (2009), pp. 77–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Brooks, William, ‘Pragmatics of Silence’, in Silence, Music, Silent Music, Losseff, Nicky and Doctor, Jenny (Oxon: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar.

27 Emma Leigh, ‘Mediated Sexuality in ASMR Videos’, 14 December 2015, on Sounding Out!, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/12/14/affect-and-sexuality-in-asmr-videos/ (accessed 5 September 2019).

28 Oliveros, Pauline, Anthology of Text Scores (Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications, 2013)Google Scholar.

29 Available from www.tonelist.com.au/scores (accessed 5 September 2019).

30 Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr, ‘About Dadirri’, 1988, on Miriam Rose Foundation, www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-dadirri (accessed 5 September 2019).

31 Ahmed, Sara, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 65–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, p. 84.

33 Brekhus, Wayne H., Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

34 ‘The Haw-Hawed Couple/Quotes’, on Simpsons Wiki, https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Haw-Hawed_Couple/Quotes (accessed 5 September 2019).

35 Hill, Linda A., Brandeau, Greg, Truelove, Emily and Lineback, Kent, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

36 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Reardon-Smith, Hannah, ‘The Uncanon: Radical Forgetting and Free Improvisation’, Sound Scripts 6/1 (2019), pp. 1–8Google Scholar. ‘Uncanon’ is a combination of the words uncanny and canon, implying an undoing that is only possible from a position of marginalisation within an artistic field.

38 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 69.

39 Juno, Angry Women.

40 Diamond, Elin, ed., Performance and Cultural Politics (Oxon: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Fast, Susan and Jennex, Craig, eds., Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions (New York: Routledge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lacy, Suzanne, Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974–2007 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macarthur, Sally, Towards a Twenty-First Century Feminist Politics of Music (Oxon; Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar.

41 Dixon, Deborah P. and Marston, Sallie A., ‘Introduction: Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics’, Gender, Place & Culture 18/4 (2011), pp. 445–53Google Scholar.

42 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

43 Latour, Bruno, ‘Waiting for Gaia: Composing the Common World through Arts and Politics’, in What is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment, ed. Yaneva, Albena and Zaera-Polo, Alejandro (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 21–32Google Scholar.