Andrew J Chung
I serve as an assistant professor of music theory at the University of North Texas, and am an incoming Long Term NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society during 2024-25.
I am a music scholar with strongly interdisciplinary interests ranging between music theory and historical musicology, further encompassing decolonial and anti-racist theory, theory of the Anthropocene, continental philosophy (especially the philosophy of language), linguistic anthropology, and sound studies. You can find my publications in Music Theory Online (2019, vol. 25, no. 1, winner of the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award), Sound Studies (2021, vol. 7, no. 1), Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (2021, vol. 2, no. 2), Music Theory Spectrum (2022, vol. 44, no. 1), the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023, vol. 76, no. 1), and forthcoming in the Journal of Music Theory (2024, vol. 68, no. 2)
My current projects are efforts aimed at developing a musicology of the Anthropocene, the name geologists have given to a new epoch of planetary history defined by human-induced climate change and its existential threats. I ask: how and where do we hear humanity's entrance into the Anthropocene in the histories and documentary records of sound and music? I follow certain Earth systems researchers and historians who argue that the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch should be recognized in the ecosystemic transformations brought about by the colonial invasions of the Americas, their enslavement economies, and the capital desires that circulated with them. Music that bears witness to colonization, enslavement, and the generation of surplus wealth are musics that bear witness to the Anthropocene's conditions of possibility.
I am currently drafting the manuscript of a book project I am calling Music’s Long Anthropocene: The Climate of Empire and the Sound of Ecological Disaster. Music's Long Anthropocene journeys through a selective but illustrative history of music's disclosures of an earth transformed by empire: wending a path through representations of the Americans on the early modern European musical stage, Indigenous American songs attesting to the lethality and ecological toll of colonization, antebellum slave work songs in their articulation to the transformation of terrestrial soil engendered by the plantation, and experimental musics reflecting the recognition of coloniality's earthly consequences. This project centralizes the rise of coloniality and the humanisms of global modernity within the origin story of the Anthropocene to theorize a historiography and ethics of music for this geological epoch. As such, this project explores how musical and sonic artworks both demand and proffer ethico-political frameworks that can adequately address how race and difference are imbricated within the differentially, unequally distributed effects of our warming planet. This work, and all of my work, seeks to dignify theory, philosophy, and interdisciplinary understandings not as alternatives to musical analysis, but as the very means of musical analysis and musical theorizing.
My interests also extend to the history of music theory, especially in the early modern Atlantic World. This work examines categories like consonance, harmony, and keyboard temperament and how the musical thinking of the 16th to 18th centuries regarding these parameters interacted with the ideologies and justificatory apparatuses of New World colonization. As discourses on tuning moved from speculative canonics on the monochord to the Early Modern emergence of temperament science on the keyboard, tuning transformed from a project of discerning the logics of God’s harmonically perfect cosmos to a project of improving, technically and technologically manipulating, and utilizing the materialities of the sublunary world. My work argues that discourses on keyboard temperaments developed new understandings of musically-usable tonal spaces as spaces in dialogue with rapidly changing theological, economic, and legal understandings of literal Earthly spaces in European thought as it sought to cope with, control, and profit from the expanding planet disclosed in the colonial project. This work examines how European theorists’ language and logics for discussing tuning and temperament were shaped by the kinds of economic, ecological, theological, jurisprudential, and natural-philosophical rationalities naturalized in the colonial project. On the other side of the Atlantic, documentation of the New World attests that Europeans’ perceptions of dissonance and mistuning were rationalized as “justifications” for imperial invasions, alongside the use of tuning and consonance as metaphors for imposing harmonious colonial administration over the colonies and their subjects.
I am a music scholar with strongly interdisciplinary interests ranging between music theory and historical musicology, further encompassing decolonial and anti-racist theory, theory of the Anthropocene, continental philosophy (especially the philosophy of language), linguistic anthropology, and sound studies. You can find my publications in Music Theory Online (2019, vol. 25, no. 1, winner of the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award), Sound Studies (2021, vol. 7, no. 1), Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (2021, vol. 2, no. 2), Music Theory Spectrum (2022, vol. 44, no. 1), the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023, vol. 76, no. 1), and forthcoming in the Journal of Music Theory (2024, vol. 68, no. 2)
My current projects are efforts aimed at developing a musicology of the Anthropocene, the name geologists have given to a new epoch of planetary history defined by human-induced climate change and its existential threats. I ask: how and where do we hear humanity's entrance into the Anthropocene in the histories and documentary records of sound and music? I follow certain Earth systems researchers and historians who argue that the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch should be recognized in the ecosystemic transformations brought about by the colonial invasions of the Americas, their enslavement economies, and the capital desires that circulated with them. Music that bears witness to colonization, enslavement, and the generation of surplus wealth are musics that bear witness to the Anthropocene's conditions of possibility.
I am currently drafting the manuscript of a book project I am calling Music’s Long Anthropocene: The Climate of Empire and the Sound of Ecological Disaster. Music's Long Anthropocene journeys through a selective but illustrative history of music's disclosures of an earth transformed by empire: wending a path through representations of the Americans on the early modern European musical stage, Indigenous American songs attesting to the lethality and ecological toll of colonization, antebellum slave work songs in their articulation to the transformation of terrestrial soil engendered by the plantation, and experimental musics reflecting the recognition of coloniality's earthly consequences. This project centralizes the rise of coloniality and the humanisms of global modernity within the origin story of the Anthropocene to theorize a historiography and ethics of music for this geological epoch. As such, this project explores how musical and sonic artworks both demand and proffer ethico-political frameworks that can adequately address how race and difference are imbricated within the differentially, unequally distributed effects of our warming planet. This work, and all of my work, seeks to dignify theory, philosophy, and interdisciplinary understandings not as alternatives to musical analysis, but as the very means of musical analysis and musical theorizing.
My interests also extend to the history of music theory, especially in the early modern Atlantic World. This work examines categories like consonance, harmony, and keyboard temperament and how the musical thinking of the 16th to 18th centuries regarding these parameters interacted with the ideologies and justificatory apparatuses of New World colonization. As discourses on tuning moved from speculative canonics on the monochord to the Early Modern emergence of temperament science on the keyboard, tuning transformed from a project of discerning the logics of God’s harmonically perfect cosmos to a project of improving, technically and technologically manipulating, and utilizing the materialities of the sublunary world. My work argues that discourses on keyboard temperaments developed new understandings of musically-usable tonal spaces as spaces in dialogue with rapidly changing theological, economic, and legal understandings of literal Earthly spaces in European thought as it sought to cope with, control, and profit from the expanding planet disclosed in the colonial project. This work examines how European theorists’ language and logics for discussing tuning and temperament were shaped by the kinds of economic, ecological, theological, jurisprudential, and natural-philosophical rationalities naturalized in the colonial project. On the other side of the Atlantic, documentation of the New World attests that Europeans’ perceptions of dissonance and mistuning were rationalized as “justifications” for imperial invasions, alongside the use of tuning and consonance as metaphors for imposing harmonious colonial administration over the colonies and their subjects.
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Publications by Andrew J Chung
climate researchers to date the beginning of the Anthropocene—the
geological epoch in which human activities define the Earth system—to the
period immediately following New World colonization. Colonial decimation
of Indigenous communities in Central and South America led to land
abandonment and a reforestation event. In 1610, this reforestation triggered
carbon dioxide sequestration and a planetary low point of CO2, a climatic
signal that geologists call the “Orbis Spike.” I explore how colonization’s
Orbis Spike alters the historiographical horizons for approaching musical and
aural documents of the early modern to nineteenth-century Atlantic. The
Orbis Spike proposal challenges musicological inquiry into the Anthropocene
to be not only ecologically and musicologically sensitive, but also decolonial,
antiracist, and critical of global capitalism. Accordingly, I develop Anthropocenic
recontextualizations of Purcell’s Indian Queen (1695), eighteenthand
nineteenth-century musical and ethnographic representations of Native
American “Death Songs,” and two practices of Indigenous resurgence via
song: psalmody and Ghost Dance ceremonies. Recognizing how the lethality
of colonization shaped the Anthropocene confronts the time of musical
history with geological time, centering Anthropocene climate change as a
background analytical framework for music seemingly far-removed from
familiar ecomusicological themes. Ultimately, this article demonstrates
Anthropocene stakes for early modern music studies and foregrounds the
colonial underpinnings and contemporary racial asymmetries of ecological
precarity as urgent questions for musicology’s emerging engagement with
the Anthropocene.
There are numerous reviews of the volume already, includ- ing an excellent and quite comprehensive four-author under- taking published in Music Theory Online.1 It is to that essay that I would point readers for an in-depth survey of the vol- ume’s contents and achievements. The task that I pursue in this single-author review, however, will not be to document a journey from first recto to last verso, but rather to present the kind of appraisal of opportunities taken—and missed—that can be uttered from a solo reviewer’s critical vantage point. I will cover many (though far from all) of the volume’s 26 indi- vidual chapters, peripatetically and cross-sectionally, drawing out both the themes that suture multiple contributions as well as those that make themselves known through their conspicu- ous absence. I’d like to frame the review below in the same spirit of critique announced in the very title of the volume (“Critical Concepts ... ”) by posing the following question: what is the place the CCMT might occupy in the ongoingness of music-theoretical work—now that we find ourselves gazing and listening back upon the year of its publication (2019), par- titioned from that date by the Covid-19 pandemic and the many precarities it exposed and exacerbated, difficult reckon- ings with racial and colonial and economic asymmetries at the national level and beyond, plus an unusually eventful (and, for many, painful) period of disciplinary agon in music theory? I won’t attempt to formulate a tidy answer to that query, but simply to draw out aspects of the contributions that have pro- pelled me into moments of productive discomfort about some of the field’s entrenched value systems, priorities, and habits of thought. The splinter in one’s eye, it has been said, is a most powerful magnifying glass.
Accounts of human trafficking suggest music’s uniquely insidious role for victims forcibly trafficked into strip club-based sex work, wherein music is ubiquitous. In sociological fieldwork, sex workers and trafficking victims testify to various effects of musical sound: against their will, the onset of music commands bodies to perform erotic dance, and songs’ formal and rhythmic features compel forms of movement. In situations of strip club-based trafficking, events of musicalsound therefore amount to coercion – itself defined as a form of sexual violence by the World Health Organization. Comprehending structures of trafficking victims’ abjection requires communicative,semiotic understandings of coercion’s mechanisms, and must resist conflating violence andphysical materiality. Building on J. L. Austin’s theorization of how verbal utterances perform certain kinds of semiotic actions, I argue that musical sound can behave like certain assaultive and coercive speech acts: acts of signaling that command sexual performances from trafficking victims within gross power asymmetries. A discourse analysis of the public forum online “The Ultimate Strip Club List” (TUSCL), which hosts discussions amongst both sex workers and patrons of strip clubs, suggests situations where the entanglement of sound and materiality loses explanatory and emancipatory power to critique music’s injurious capacities.
Successful Fellowship Proposals by Andrew J Chung
Reviewer Comments and Responses to Reviewers by Andrew J Chung
PhD Dissertation by Andrew J Chung
This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects.
In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound.
To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.
Undergraduate (BA) Thesis by Andrew J Chung
Talks by Andrew J Chung
My examination of elemental, climatic musical media begins with Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1555 account of journeying with conquistador Pánfilo Narváez’s 1527 Caribbean expedition. At port in Cuba during October 1527, hurricane winds and rain descended upon Cabeza de Vaca and several companions. They came in earshot of a group of Indigenous Taino, hearing “a great uproar, the sound of many voices, and a great noise of small bells, flutes, tambourines, and other instruments. Most of this noise lasted until morning, when the storm ended. Such a terrifying thing has never been experienced in [Spain].” Here, a storm became a lens through which Indigenous musicking was transmitted. Conversely, the tempest was mediated to Cabeza de Vaca's perception amidst what early modern Spaniards commonly regarded as demonic, “devilish” sound. Evidently, both tempest and Taino sound amplified and mediated each other’s terror.
Many other colonizers’ narratives like José de Acosta’s History of the Indies (1590) or Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578) documented Indigenous American music making in larger projects of surveying the Americas. These accounts, however, also arose in intellectual, climatological contexts of gathering new data about the so-called “torrid zone”—tropical terrestrial spaces where heat supposedly made native societies lazy, cheerfully docile, and thus apt for colonial invasion. I argue that background ideologies of climate determinism and preconceptions concerning the torrid zone’s inhabitants shaped colonizers’ judgments of Indigenous American societies and their musics. These climatically mediated sonic judgments, in turn, reinforced climate determinist understandings of Indigenous societies as ripe for conquest.
climate researchers to date the beginning of the Anthropocene—the
geological epoch in which human activities define the Earth system—to the
period immediately following New World colonization. Colonial decimation
of Indigenous communities in Central and South America led to land
abandonment and a reforestation event. In 1610, this reforestation triggered
carbon dioxide sequestration and a planetary low point of CO2, a climatic
signal that geologists call the “Orbis Spike.” I explore how colonization’s
Orbis Spike alters the historiographical horizons for approaching musical and
aural documents of the early modern to nineteenth-century Atlantic. The
Orbis Spike proposal challenges musicological inquiry into the Anthropocene
to be not only ecologically and musicologically sensitive, but also decolonial,
antiracist, and critical of global capitalism. Accordingly, I develop Anthropocenic
recontextualizations of Purcell’s Indian Queen (1695), eighteenthand
nineteenth-century musical and ethnographic representations of Native
American “Death Songs,” and two practices of Indigenous resurgence via
song: psalmody and Ghost Dance ceremonies. Recognizing how the lethality
of colonization shaped the Anthropocene confronts the time of musical
history with geological time, centering Anthropocene climate change as a
background analytical framework for music seemingly far-removed from
familiar ecomusicological themes. Ultimately, this article demonstrates
Anthropocene stakes for early modern music studies and foregrounds the
colonial underpinnings and contemporary racial asymmetries of ecological
precarity as urgent questions for musicology’s emerging engagement with
the Anthropocene.
There are numerous reviews of the volume already, includ- ing an excellent and quite comprehensive four-author under- taking published in Music Theory Online.1 It is to that essay that I would point readers for an in-depth survey of the vol- ume’s contents and achievements. The task that I pursue in this single-author review, however, will not be to document a journey from first recto to last verso, but rather to present the kind of appraisal of opportunities taken—and missed—that can be uttered from a solo reviewer’s critical vantage point. I will cover many (though far from all) of the volume’s 26 indi- vidual chapters, peripatetically and cross-sectionally, drawing out both the themes that suture multiple contributions as well as those that make themselves known through their conspicu- ous absence. I’d like to frame the review below in the same spirit of critique announced in the very title of the volume (“Critical Concepts ... ”) by posing the following question: what is the place the CCMT might occupy in the ongoingness of music-theoretical work—now that we find ourselves gazing and listening back upon the year of its publication (2019), par- titioned from that date by the Covid-19 pandemic and the many precarities it exposed and exacerbated, difficult reckon- ings with racial and colonial and economic asymmetries at the national level and beyond, plus an unusually eventful (and, for many, painful) period of disciplinary agon in music theory? I won’t attempt to formulate a tidy answer to that query, but simply to draw out aspects of the contributions that have pro- pelled me into moments of productive discomfort about some of the field’s entrenched value systems, priorities, and habits of thought. The splinter in one’s eye, it has been said, is a most powerful magnifying glass.
Accounts of human trafficking suggest music’s uniquely insidious role for victims forcibly trafficked into strip club-based sex work, wherein music is ubiquitous. In sociological fieldwork, sex workers and trafficking victims testify to various effects of musical sound: against their will, the onset of music commands bodies to perform erotic dance, and songs’ formal and rhythmic features compel forms of movement. In situations of strip club-based trafficking, events of musicalsound therefore amount to coercion – itself defined as a form of sexual violence by the World Health Organization. Comprehending structures of trafficking victims’ abjection requires communicative,semiotic understandings of coercion’s mechanisms, and must resist conflating violence andphysical materiality. Building on J. L. Austin’s theorization of how verbal utterances perform certain kinds of semiotic actions, I argue that musical sound can behave like certain assaultive and coercive speech acts: acts of signaling that command sexual performances from trafficking victims within gross power asymmetries. A discourse analysis of the public forum online “The Ultimate Strip Club List” (TUSCL), which hosts discussions amongst both sex workers and patrons of strip clubs, suggests situations where the entanglement of sound and materiality loses explanatory and emancipatory power to critique music’s injurious capacities.
This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects.
In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound.
To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.
My examination of elemental, climatic musical media begins with Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1555 account of journeying with conquistador Pánfilo Narváez’s 1527 Caribbean expedition. At port in Cuba during October 1527, hurricane winds and rain descended upon Cabeza de Vaca and several companions. They came in earshot of a group of Indigenous Taino, hearing “a great uproar, the sound of many voices, and a great noise of small bells, flutes, tambourines, and other instruments. Most of this noise lasted until morning, when the storm ended. Such a terrifying thing has never been experienced in [Spain].” Here, a storm became a lens through which Indigenous musicking was transmitted. Conversely, the tempest was mediated to Cabeza de Vaca's perception amidst what early modern Spaniards commonly regarded as demonic, “devilish” sound. Evidently, both tempest and Taino sound amplified and mediated each other’s terror.
Many other colonizers’ narratives like José de Acosta’s History of the Indies (1590) or Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578) documented Indigenous American music making in larger projects of surveying the Americas. These accounts, however, also arose in intellectual, climatological contexts of gathering new data about the so-called “torrid zone”—tropical terrestrial spaces where heat supposedly made native societies lazy, cheerfully docile, and thus apt for colonial invasion. I argue that background ideologies of climate determinism and preconceptions concerning the torrid zone’s inhabitants shaped colonizers’ judgments of Indigenous American societies and their musics. These climatically mediated sonic judgments, in turn, reinforced climate determinist understandings of Indigenous societies as ripe for conquest.
This paper connects early keyboard temperament schemes (described by Gaffurius and others) and New World coloniality. In practical writings, theorists transmit procedures already common among late fifteenth-century organists: tempering fifths slightly, by unspecified amounts, with largely underspecified results. In colonial New Spain, such simple, practical advice for tuning organs would have been advantageous in facilitating setup and maintenance of early colonial organs. These instruments were used to teach Natives the intervallically "correct" singing of vocal polyphony, disciplining them as subjects of Spanish Christian conquest. Keyboard temperament was among the many mundane tools that facilitated New World conquest's specific forms.
Critical race theorists like Zakkiyah Jackson and Fred Moten, however, have pointed out that such radically universal ontologies occlude the human sphere’s internal rivenness. This results in race-blind, difference-blind political imaginaries, silencing injustices affecting differentially marginalized populations. Putting Jackson and Moten in conversation with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, I argue (contra Fure and Eidsheim) that sonic vibration is better understood not as an ontological unifier, but as a figure for human and non-human entities’ recognitions of each’s singularity, alterity, and vulnerability to each other, which buttress foundational ethical injunctions to avoid harming those others.
I clarify with Pamela Z’s Syrinx (2003), which slows down recorded birdsong until a singer can imitate it. The voice is recorded and gradually manipulated to match the birdsong’s original register and speed. Syrinx frames human and non-human lifeforms not as ontologically same, but as reciprocally open to one another, yet sonically irreducible to each other. Its transformations of bird and human vocalizations point to each’s opening towards becoming sonically other than themselves—hence towards becoming vulnerable. This reading of Syrinx reconfigures The Force of Things to hear both as occasions for ecological solidarity, while avoiding the colorblindness of grounding solidarity in violently occluding the other’s difference.
I theorize the uncanny, apparitional qualities of recorded sound, arguing that such effects may occur when musical/vocal sounds are produced by mechanisms considered unconducive to producing those sounds. Furthermore, recorded sound possesses two intertwined semiotic capacities when producing apparitional presences: both indexically presupposing (referring to) the bodies of recorded musicians and seeming to conjure them as spectral-if not actual-presences within the context of audition, a process called indexical entailment.
I demonstrate with examples including the phonograph and recent experimental music. As phonographs became domesticated and better understood by auditory publics, they were increasingly considered to be credible rather than bewildering sources of musical/vocal sound and were thereafter conceptualized not in supernatural terms, but in terms of sonic fidelity. Composer Peter Ablinger's Quadraturen III series (2004-present) recreates the epistemological bewilderment attending the phonograph's early supernaturally-tinged reception. A modified player-piano mechanism reproduces recorded voices on the keyboard, a technology seemingly unconducive to vocal sound reproduction. In Quadraturen III, the discomfiting fidelity of the piano's sound to the human voice it presupposes enables it to serve as an incantation that conjures the spectral presence of the voice's owner--the ghostly, virtual performer (a Derridean phantasm, qua Specters of Marx) who both speaks through and is summoned by the keyboard.
Linguistic speech-acts, ranging from the matrimonial “I do,” to hate speech and its genuinely injurious force, mean what they mean not primarily through referential and denotative sign function, not from transmitting messages or conveying signified meaning-content. Rather, speech-acts rely on a performative efficacy of signs: the way in which signs create, sustain, transform, or destroy features of reality. I highlight the way signs “do” things to subjects, and how subjects “do” things with them.
To demonstrate a performative semiotics of music qua speech-act, I introduce Alvin Lucier’s 1969 piece for vocalist and tape-delay system, The Only Talking Machine of its Kind in the World , scored for: “any stutterer, stammerer, lisper, person with faulty or halting speech, regional dialect or foreign accent or any other anxious speaker who believes in the healing power of sound.” Lucier instructs: “Talk, during the building of the tape-delay system, about that which will best reveal the peculiarities of your speech [...] Continue talking after the completion of the tape-delay system until, due to the annihilation of the peculiarities of your speech by the tape-delay system, anxiety about your speech is relieved.” Lucier intends for his piece and the tape delay system it employs to enact a healing through being “uttered.” The crux of Lucier’s Talking Machine thus abides in its pragmatic function and speech-act character. Lucier’s musical “utterance” gains its central meaning from the medicinal efficacy it means to wield over the performer’s afflicted speech.
I continue with Lucier’s 2005 piece for orchestra and electronics, Exploration of the House , based on Beethoven’s op. 124 Consecration of the House . Lucier’s orchestra performs fragments of Beethoven’s overture, which are recorded and subsequently played back into the performance space. This playback is then simultaneously recorded and then projected into the room repeatedly in an iterative process that transforms the original audio signal as the resonant frequencies of the space reinforce themselves and deposit onto the playback. Exploration of the House induces a strategic transformation of listening style. Lucier first quotes Beethoven, thereby mobilizing a particular practice of structural, motivic, orchestrational listening that acculturated audiences typically employ when hearing Western common-practice period music. This listening practice is then radically, pragmatically transformed by the playback process into an utterly different manner of listening geared not towards structural hearing but rather towards the audition of resonance. While Lucier’s music is often said to be about the acoustics of sounding spaces, I argue that Exploration of the House has a semiotic concern at its heart: it enacts the pragmatic transformation of listening practices through the semiotic efficacy of its technical process.
Testimonies of dancers/prostitutes interviewed by Kara and Penttinen include detailed accounts of music’s action: the onset of music commands bodies to perform, rhythmic features regulate the movement of bodies, and songs’ formal climaxes dictate that bodies intensify their performances. Music wields authority in these contexts to utter sovereign commands for sexual performances that cannot be meaningfully refused by the subject. Music is thereby instrumentalized to perform discursive acts of sexual violence and the subjugation of victims, a violence performed not by sonic amplitude or decibel force, but through the injurious and subjugative force of what Butler calls “sovereign speech-acts.” I question Butler’s skeptical conclusion regarding the sovereign speech-act. She theorizes a resistant politics by noting that any apparently sovereign intention of a speech-act never inherently guarantees its efficacy, but the examples of Kara and Penttinen demonstrate contexts in which it is unreasonable to expect that the sovereignty of speech-acts (musical or otherwise) can be meaningfully thwarted by the subjects they differentially harm.