Difference/Universality, Part 1: Queer Music Theorist, Disoriented

(Working draft. This post is about the concept of “disorientation” in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology.)

When I was 18, I backpacked around Scotland and ended up on New Year’s Eve at a pub in the Orkney Islands off the northern tip of the country. I was having a good time until a homophobic older guy said something incredibly offensive to me. That was my first memory of being overtly discriminated against. In such a situation, I might have felt intimidated, but the 18-year old me, filled with liquid courage from a beer (you can drink at 18 in the UK), felt pretty much fearless and told him to basically shut the front door. I was fine because some random homophobe meant nothing to me.

What was difficult, though, was constantly being ignored by my "own" people. Having lived in the closet in Singapore for my entire life up to that point, I finally came out in London, and sought out the gay community. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the vast majority of white gays regarded people of color as invisible, and that hit me like a sucker punch. I felt like I had nowhere to go, and didn’t know what to do—it was disorientating. Being a person of color defined my experience with the gay community.

Later on, when I was completing my doctoral degree in the US, I returned frequently to San Francisco, where there were so many Asians that I had no difficulty orientating myself within the gay community. Of course, there was still exclusion, but I felt like I could breathe. One time I was waiting for a bus and ended up talking to a bartender about some novel he had read about Buddha’s life. “Was it Hesse’s Siddhartha?,” I asked (it was). Over a Swiss writer’s problematically orientalist novel, a gay-Chinese-musicologist bonded obliquely with a straight-white-bartender. This involved convoluted social intersectionalities and relationalities, but it was not disorienting in the least because our interaction was warm and positive.

I’m not suggesting that my specific experiences in these various places are necessarily indicative of their general social atmosphere. I recall them in an effort to think through experiences of disorientation that Sara Ahmed theorizes as “queer phenomenology.” Starting with the trope of the Orient, Ahmed weaves the imperial gaze of Europe—a way of orienting oneself towards the Other—together with minority racial and queer experiences of disorientation. The privilege of being able to orient oneself, to have access to well laid out paths, is enjoyed by whites, but also, in certain contexts, by people of color who usually face the disorientation of not knowing where to turn, having been shut out.

When doors have been opened for me, it was because others have been inclined towards the alternative and the other (even if viewed through an ethically suspect, orientalist lens). This predisposition towards alterity can be described as a kind of positively valenced, curiosity-based “disorientation” from one’s own culture. When everyone is so inclined, we have a friendly environment in which diversity is a universal value. This is one way of explaining the tenet of anti-normativity which was key in the queer theory of the 90s, and which I have observed in recent years as I led the project for queer music theory. Queer music theory is not just the province of queer music theorists—it encompasses work by all music theorists who are dedicated to the advancement of anti-normative music-theoretical methods, while crucially acknowledging the lives of LGBTQ people who have no choice but to be different. In queer music theory, anti-normativity serves as the general, universal ethical principle and as a means of coalition building across different identities. This is different from my experiences in Orkney and London, when heteronormativity was the universal. While there is a structural similarity between a universal anti-normativity in “queer” music-theoretical practice, and other oppressive forms of universality, the crux of the matter is that the former is anchored in the intention to advance queer recognition and is methodologically structured to achieve that goal.

We live in an age when difference has been commodified in monetized blog posts that purport to discover earth shattering difference (choice of words, politicians, ethical orientations). Add to this the catastrophic history of Eurocentric universality, and it may seem to be impossible for us to contemplate a complex ethical framework that differentiates between the positive and negative effects of both difference and universality. Certainly, we seem inclined to prefer to regard academics as purely progressive or oppressive unities instead of imperfect multiplicities. I have seen feminists, including feminists of color, who were rejected based on even just hearsay about (as opposed to evidence of) their alleged transphobia or anti-Semitism. Obviously, no form of discrimination is acceptable, but the lowering of the threshold of judgement to mere hearsay suggests that academia is organized more around the fantasy of a perfectly integrated scholar who is perfectly woke on all fronts, as opposed to the reality of multiple, well-intentioned but conflicting conceptual paradigms that impinge on anyone of us today. Assuming that the scholar has a body of work which indicates their commitment to social equity, intellectual disagreement should (at least at first) be regarded as grounds of intellectual foment that speak to the irreducible complexity of social life, rather than as the means of oppressing one another: this is something that all sides of any debate should bear in mind.

Politically, the concept and practice of coalition building on the left have all but vanished, as all forms of universality (such as within coalitions) are suspected of being racist means of distracting from the experiences of the marginalized. But a coalitional politics without a horizon of universality alongside its internal differences is doomed to failure in a democratic system built on majority rule. My project in The Means and End of Difference is a musicological attempt to cultivate habits of thought that can nourish remedies for this situation.

Difference/Universality, Part 2: Primer for Identity Politics

(Working draft)

This is a “primer for a primer” on identity politics:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/#ContPhilEngaIdenPoli

In the following, I’ll present the main ideas found in the complex secondary literature review on the entire body of work on identity politics (race, class, gender, sexuality, philosophy, poststructuralism) covered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy primer. This post is not a replacement for reading the original primer!

The Stanford primer was revised in 2016 and unfortunately does not give an adequate account of writings since then on especially disability and transgender theory.

Some of the ideas below will already be familiar to the reader, but I have decided to be comprehensive in my approach, as relatively recent developments are related to earlier thinking.

Reading strategy. I would say that the key strategy in reading the primer is to recognize the complexity of the subject of identity politics, expressed in persistent contradictions about it that run throughout the primer. Primarily, there is a recognition of the existence of identity, coupled with the critique that identity is constructed by hegemonic society. Thus any emphasis on identity is simultaneously (i) a means of articulating minority viewpoints and a fulcrum for resisting the majority, and (ii) the maintenance of the hegemonic system in which power asymmetry led to the inequality that necessitates the articulation of different identities. This points to (iii) the need for supplements or alternatives to identity, e.g. the creation of an anti-hegemonic coalition of identities, or a turn to embodiment. All three threads need to be kept in play if identity is to be understood in its full complexity. This is the conceptual background to my work in The Means and End of Difference.

Arguments for identity/difference

(i) What is identity?

·      The basic premise, from a contemporary academic viewpoint (as opposed to a historical or popular viewpoint), is that identity exists within and is “constructed” by society. Social identity is not a reflection of biology and anatomy. “Racial” identity is a means of assigning people of different ancestry into socially-determined groups, as opposed to scientific, biological groups (Omi and Winant 1986, Alcoff 1997, 2006, Piper 1996, Ignatiev 1995).

(ii) The importance of identity:

·      Identity expresses an authentic sense of self (Asante 2000).

·      Identity demands respect for different life experiences (Kruks 2001).

·      Identity is the foundation for empirical political action because it accurately describes the unequal conditions of different groups (Cudd 2006, Fanon 1968, McIntosh 1993, Martin 1994, Young 1990).

(iii) Strategies for the use of identity:

·      Identity may be adopted strategically for political purposes (Spivak 1990).

·      Identity can be articulated in relation to one another, in order to avoid creating the “essentialist” impression that these identities are naturally existing, as opposed to socially constructed (Young 2000, Nelson 2001).

·      Hybrid identities should be recognized (Anzaldúa 1999).

Criticism of identity/difference

(i) Problems with identity:

·      Identity is socially constructed (Haslanger 1995, 2005, Hacking 1999, Foucault 1980, Garber 1995) within an unjust system. Hence relying on majority-minority identities discursively reinforces and reproduces the power asymmetry in an unjust system (Fraser 1997, Coulthard 2014, Butler 1999, Connolly 2002), and reflects a simplified account of power (McNay 2008).

·      The essentialist identity of (maternal, caring) “woman” is created by patriarchy (entire section on “Gender and Feminism). See Ruddick 1989 and Gilligan 1993 for a controversial attempt to recoup “essentialist” feminine identity.

·      Identity is exclusionary when transgender identity is excluded in gay and lesbian theorizing (Stone 1991, Lugones 1994).

·      LGBTQ identity alone as a means of resistance is inadequate: identity-based organizing is not immune to the multiplicity of homophobic strategies because identity allows for both resistance and oppression (Sedgwick 1990).

·      Internal variation (by race, class, gender, sexuality, or within their sub-categories) within a specific group identity is ignored (Heyes 2000).

·      A narrow focus on only minority racial, gender, or sexual identity distracts from systemic white perspectives and oppression (Pateman 1988, Young 1990, Di Stefano 1991, Mills 1997, Pateman and Mills 2007, hooks 1981, Mohanty 1991) as well as liberal-capitalist exploitation (Young 1990, P. Williams 1991, Brown 1995, M. Williams 1998, Farred 2000, McNay 2008).

·      A focus on racial, gender, and sexual identity (as opposed to class identity) is due to the reluctance of middle-class whites in academia to examine their privileged economic position. In addition, there may be a focus on racial, gender, and sexual identity (as opposed to class identity) because whites in academia do not recognize their class oppression, displacing this onto others instead (Brown 1995).

(ii) Alternatives to identity:

·      Articulating a future (Zerilli 2005, Weir 2008, Bhambra and Margee 2010, Coole and Frost 2010, Connolly 2011) is important, as opposed to identities premised on the pain of historical oppression (Brown 1995).

·      Meaning, action, feeling, embodiment, affect, time, and space (Protevi 2009, 2011, Butler 2011, Heyes 2007) provide a fuller account of social inequities and existence than identity, which is restrictive (Appiah 1994) and reductive (Spelman 1988).

Arguments against universality 

·      Assimilation to the majority perpetuates hegemony (Young 1990, Card 2007).

·      Color-blindness (not recognizing difference) disguises and perpetuates racism (Appiah and Gutmann 1996).

·      Heterosexuality as a norm is oppressive: varied sexual orientations are immutable and cannot be “cured.”

·      In decolonial and lesbian feminist thought, separatism is the solution (Laforest in Beiner and Norman 2001, Alfred 1999, Asante 2000, Rich 1980, Frye 1983, Wittig 1992).

Arguments for universality (within a coalition)

·      Alliance and coalition formation (Heyes 2000, Young 1997, Cornell 2000) is necessary, as opposed to an exclusive focus on the difference between identities.

Difference/Universality, Part 3: The Means and End of Difference

(Working draft)

Having lived in different parts of the world, I have closely observed variations in social inequities and power structures that inform my project in the rethinking of difference through multiple angles. Below I’ll give an account of some first-hand experiences which have influenced my work. My own primer for the Stanford (Encyclopedia of Philosophy) primer on identity politics provides the conceptual apparatus which the following speaks to.

One of my most striking memories of living in China for the past 5 years was when I checked in to a hotel in Shanghai, and the concierge—upon seeing my Singaporean passport—said, “Oh, so you’re a laowai.” Laowai is a derogatory term which denotes foreigners, but literally translates as “old outsider.” It is usually used to refer to white foreigners, so the concierge’s application of the term to me was rather shocking. What that speech act accomplished, in no uncertain terms, was that I—a Chinese Singaporean in China—am as much of an outsider as white foreigners. This experience of being marginalized as a Chinese in China brought back other memories, e.g. people yelling out “Chinese,” or, even better, “Japanese,” during the years which I spent in London. The dynamics of the contexts were different: being a minority in the UK is not the same as being “not Chinese enough” in China. Whereas I felt like I had to escape from the people mis/identifying my difference in the UK, I never felt afraid in China, though I had to prove my Chineseness by reciting the syllabus for my Chinese music history course to the then chair of music education at my university. (She asked, in an innocuous conversational tone, during the first few months I spent in China, “So what are you teaching for the history of music in China?”)

Within my personal experiences of marginalization, there were definitive differences. There is, in addition, the difference in the way that racism operated in my encounters in London, versus in the tumultuous race politics of the US. Over the past decade, social media has contributed to the development of ever more insidious forms of racism, as racist discursive innovation is nurtured by the textual nature of voluminous Facebook posts and tweets. “All Lives Matter,” while maintaining the “plausible” deniability of being about a universal concern for humanity, is in fact intended as a racist invisibilization of the Black Lives Matter movement. Oppression exerts itself through both universalization and minoritization (“Japanese!”).

Because systemic racism is universal and can be found everywhere in racist society, so anti-racism must be vigilant against all acts and discourses—anti-racism must be universal as well. Yet the universalization of our anti-racist responses can create problems when we examine cases that depart from catastrophic oppression, because anti-hegemony constitutes part of the totality of social life, and points to strategies which we may use to fight back.

Over the past few years, I have been involved in the work of queer advocacy within the Society for Music Theory. In 2018-9, I was appointed to a Task Force for Diversity which recommended the formation of a standing committee for LGBTQ issues. The task force was comprised of representatives from various constituencies, including the SMT Executive Board, as well as groups dedicated to issues of race, gender, and accessibility. Together we formed an alliance that was dedicated to the advancement of queer advocacy, even though most members of the task force did not identify as queer—that is to say, members of the task force, coming from multiple anti-normative perspectives (whether race, gender, or accessibility), converged on the specific anti-normativity of issues surrounding LGBTQ music theory theorists and queer music theory. In this case, a paradoxical universality of anti-normativity within our alliance was critical to the advancement of minority rights, showing that even universals are not universally oppressive. Anti-normativity was a key tenet for queer theorists in the 90s (David Halperin, Lee Edelman), and continued to be the guidepost for more recent theorizations of queer temporality (Elizaeth Freeman) and queer phenomenology (Sara Ahmed).

Aside from my work and life in the US, UK, and China, my experience in Singapore has brought another perspective to the problem of inequity, related in this instance to the issue of difference and stereotype. Those of us from various parts of Asia are regularly consigned as “other” in the West and are expected to “perform” our identity. One of the Singaporean composers I work with, Joyce Koh, recounted to me the alienating experience of being expected by the French audience to write “intercultural” music incorporating Chinese culture into her modernist musical language, which she developed over the course of her doctoral degree at York University (UK), and a decade spent working in Paris, initially at IRCAM and under the mentorship of Tristan Murail. In this case, the cosmopolitan universality of modernism was a means of escape from enforced ethnic stereotype, complicating the colonial history of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. There are times when joining a progressive or cosmopolitan universality can be freeing.

I go into detail about all these experiences because they inform my rethinking of difference and universality, wherein the difference of identity can in some contexts be oppressive, and universality (of anti-normativity and cosmopolitanism) can in some contexts be progressive. Which is to say, that context is everything when we perform ethical analysis. This is why we need to recognize how difference and universality are each means to multiple, different ends. I realize that this level of detail is increasingly difficult to maintain in a US context which has been becoming more and more racist over the past 4 years. But as scholars, our responsibility is to articulate ever more finessed truths, because the complexity of systemic racism calls for a multiplicity of anti-racist approaches. This ties back to a fundamental point: As musicologists, we know that the articulation of historical and cultural difference, as well as difference within archival and ethnographic data, is one of the hallmarks of good scholarship. It’s time to bring this differentiation to the analysis of ethical frameworks and precepts.

For more on the new universality, see my guest lecture at University of Oregon, Provincializing Western Modernism, Ping-Ponging the New Universality, and my panel at AMS 2019, Reassembling the Bird's Eye View in Musicology.

Global East Asian Music Research: Proposals for New Directions in Musicology (AMS 2018 panel abstract)

Sheryl Chow
Brent Ferguson
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee (respondent)
Jungmin Mina Lee
Yawen Ludden
Noriko Manabe
Brooke McCorkle
Dani Osterman
Hye Jung Park

In recent years, research on music and East Asia has achieved critical mass within AMS. Extending beyond the exotic representation of East Asia within European and American music, this body of work draws on an eclectic array of primary resources and methodologies. This panel unites a new generation of researchers who deal with corpuses of texts, images, musics, and sounds flowing in and out of East Asia. The presenters have deep knowledge of East Asian languages and cultures and examine multiple Western and non-Western musical genres. We aim to provide a comprehensive survey of methodologies, areas of study, and interdisciplinary formations that currently inform global East Asian music research.

While ethnomusicology has long been the disciplinary home of East Asian music research, this panel consolidates an emerging framework that complements the ethnographic study of folk music and departs from it. In recent decades, AMS has witnessed an emerging global consciousness, as evidenced both in peer-reviewed panels (2017 panel on “Western Music and China: A Chapter in Global Music History”), and non-peer reviewed panels specially organized by the AMS leadership (e.g. 2011 panel on “Teaching Western Music in China Today”). Building on that momentum, we present papers that have a close affinity with research directions broadly recognized as _musicological_ in orientation. Our papers are anchored in history, music analysis, and visual studies, and we address avant-garde, Western, and hybrid music. We are comprised of senior scholars in the field such as Thomas Irvine (co-chair) and Noriko Manabe, as well as emerging scholars such as Jungmin Mina Lee (co-chair) and Gavin Lee (respondent).

Our papers are organized around the following research clusters. 1) The impact and contestation of Western music as discerned in the emergence of new hybrid genres in Korea (Hye-Jung Park), the Korean avant-garde (Jungmin Mina Lee), and the development of musical institutions of Western art music in Japan (Brooke McCorkle). 2) “Global intellectual history” (Thomas Irvine, drawing on Moyn and Sartory’s concept), historiography of music in China (Gavin Lee), and history of music theory in China (Sheryl Chow). 3) Theory and analysis of Chinese traditional music (Yawen Ludden). 4) Visual culture of Japan (Matthew Richardson), and multimedia studies of film, anime, and video games (Brent Ferguson, Dani Osterman). 5) Transnational popular music (Noriko Manabe).

A distinctive feature of this panel is that presenters, who are often individually experts in one East Asian country, will collaborate on the crafting of position papers, with the aim of articulating connections between multiple East Asian countries within each presentation. In this way, we model collaborative research within a transnational framework. Eleven presenters will speak for ten minutes each in this three-hour evening panel, leaving over an hour for general floor discussion. The concluding goal of this panel is the formation of a Global East Asian Music Research study group within AMS.

Western Music and China: A Chapter in Global Music History (AMS 2017 panel abstract)

Deng Jia
Hong Ding
Gavin Lee, chair
Nancy Rao
Zhu Huanqing

Today, Western art music is growing at an unprecedented rate in China, with the setting up of new conservatories every few years, and the continual emergence of star Chinese performers such as Lang Lang. With China set to spearhead the global growth of Western art music in the twenty-first century, a consideration of the history of Western art music and China is timely. Rather than focusing merely on how Western art music is taught in China (AMS 2011 panel on “Teaching Western Music in China Today”), there is a critical need to examine the reception and practice of Western art music in China. (The definition of the “West” as a cultural unit—and by extension “Western music”—can be taken from Cook 2014, which tracks 1) the global reception of Europe as the musical reference point of the last five centuries, 2) the impact of American popular music, and 3) the Euro-American consumption of “world” music.) As detailed in McCollum & Hebert eds. 2014, the history of music around the world has been documented since the nineteenth century. Even with the rise of interest in historical ethnomusicology (which focuses mostly on non-Western music), however, it is clear that there is a hunk of global music history which falls outside the purview of both ethnomusicology and musicology—Western art music in the non-Western world. This panel addresses that lacuna.

Recent scholarship building towards a global history of music includes the 2016 AMS panel led by Bloechl and Solis, Bohlman ed. 2014, and Strohm’s Balzan Prize project. However, these projects often replicate the current state of scholarship by continuing to privilege Western academic voices. There is a need to involve the voices of others who speak for themselves as co-creators of knowledge in a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire 1970). This panel features large-scale collaboration between researchers from different disciplinary traditions. While most of us are located in an innovative institution set up in China in 2013 with a majority of international faculty—Soochow University School of Music, we work across the research traditions of China, Hong Kong, and the United States.

The opening paper by Gavin Lee (Soochow University) advances a global history of Western art music, through the case of China, as: 1) the history of _contested reception_, 2) the history of _adaption_ to local musical culture, and 3) comparative historiography. The use of the Folk as an organizing concept in Chinese music historiography creates conceptual distortions (e.g. the concept of the Folk Music Era, 960-1911), as well as an opportunity to rewrite a people-focused, global history of Western art music. Lee chairs the panel and has published and presented in conferences across musicological and ethnomusicological lines.

The remainder of this 90-min session comprises three historical papers and a response by Nancy Yunhwa Rao (Rutgers University), who is known for her extensive research in Chinese, Chinese-American, and American composers and musical culture. (All five of the panel segments are 10 minutes in length and are delivered consecutively without intervening discussion, leaving 40 minutes for general discussion with the audience at the end.) The three historical papers are presented by bilingual researchers who are mining Chinese texts in order to write the Chinese chapter of the global history of Western art music. All of these papers focus on the years before, during and after the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and document the shifting reception and practice of Western art music during these tumultuous years. Aside from the obvious topical relevance of this time period, the increasing number of Chinese publications on cultural and musical issues from 1950 onwards makes research in this time span possible. The meticulous work in the three historical papers builds on the general narrative of Western art music and China, as well as on more detailed studies, in existing scholarship (e.g. Melvin & Cai 2004, 2015).

The second half of the twentieth century saw the large-scale professionalization of Western art music—barring the period of the Cultural Revolution when Western art music was banned—as well as the attendant contest of cultural values. Hong Ding (Chinese University of Hong Kong) examines the reception of one of the only eight officially approved works which could be performed during the Cultural Revolution, the Peking opera _Victory at Tiger Mountain_, which however uses the Western symphony orchestra. He analyzes discourse on the opera to track how the use of the symphony orchestra served as a political lightning rod that variously received approbation during the Cultural Revolution (when no opposition could ever be voiced), and criticism after 1976 when the political movement was officially refuted.

The final two papers focus on the years before and after the Cultural Revolution through case studies. Deng Jia (Soochow University) examines the controversy which erupted over Debussy in 1964 in _Wenhui_ newspaper, in which proponents of the composer were pitted against communist critics who refuted Debussy on the grounds that he is “capitalist.” Zhu Huanqing (Soochow University) examines the cultural background of the work of Debussy-influenced composer, Wang Lisan, whose post-Cultural Revolution piano suite _The Paintings of Dongshan Kuiyi_ (1979) was inspired by the titular Japanese artist. Using the discourse (recorded in print in the Chinese journal _Music of the People_) of Chinese and Japanese composers who visited each other’s countries in 1981, Zhu elucidates the surprisingly successful re-establishment of diplomatic-cultural ties between the two countries after China’s multiple and catastrophic defeats at the hands of the Japanese.

Together, the papers in this panel articulate a framework of global music history, and elaborates on it through the case study of Western art music and China. In line with the postcolonial thought of Homi Bhabha and Achille Mbembe, we focus on untangling the morass of factors affecting the local context where Western art music was introduced, examining reception, composition, and orchestration. It is by delving deeply into historical details that we can contest the notion of a “Western art music” which preserves a constant identity as it is disseminated throughout the world.

Queer Music Theory: Interrogating Notes of Sexuality (AMS/SMT 2014 panel abstract)

Naomi Andre
William Cheng
Amy Cimini
James Currie

Roger Grant
Nadine Hubbs, co-chair
Kevin Korsyn
Gavin Lee, co-chair
Judith Peraino

“Queer music theory” is a fantastically nebulous concept. On the one hand, the academic subfield of music theory has become increasingly interested in queer studies during a time in which queer theorists have had occasion to ask “what’s queer about queer studies now?” (the titular question of a recent Social Text special issue). On the other, the conjunction of queer theory with music theory demands a reinvestigation of what is meant by music theory in the first place. Bringing these two forms of inquiry together, this session aims to generate discussion on music, queerness, and theory, opening up new paths of inquiry at their points of intersection. We hope to provide methods for thinking through the concept, practice, and politics of “queer music theory,” asking how queer theory and music theory might be brought into new productive conversations.

The conundrum of queer music theory is approached first by asking: what is “music theory”? The crux of the issue here relates once again to the hoary problematic of the purely musical. After Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, we are familiar with the marginalization/universalization dialectic that forces otherness into a minute space of irrelevance—for music theory, this arguably means stuffing “queerness” into “musical practice”—and maintaining that closet by unleashing repressing forces when queerness seeps into “music theory.” However expressed, the problematic of queer music theory is not merely one of definition, but also of epistemological policing. The challenge of this panel lies in the questioning of epistemic boundaries: How is musical unity heteronormative? Is formalism queer? What is queer musical temporality and timbre?

A further consideration, informed by Sedgwick, is how queer music theory should negotiate queer studies’ charge of anti-normativity. A queer music theory with general applicability may be attractive for the challenge it poses to varied normativities beyond the sexual. However, this ubiquity also arguably robs queer music theory of its relevance to LGBTQ-identified knowledges, practices, and lives. We address the problematic of the particularity of queer lives versus the broader applicability of queer music theory.

This 3h joint session of alternative format comprises 6 position papers and 2 responses (William Cheng; Kevin Korsyn), each followed by floor discussion.

Nadine historizes the problematic of the broad applicability which stems from queer theory’s anti-normative charge, re-examining the role of dominant American middle-class culture in the success of the LGBTQ rights movement through an analysis of David Allan Coe’s 1978 underground track “Fuck Aneta Briant,” a song of the Outlaw country genre. Beyond the support of White middle-class Americans who love to identify with outsiders and rebels, to the extent that it is no longer clear who is “queer,” working- class people has a long history as sex and gender queers and allies. This study leads to an examination of the definitions of queerness and queer music theory.

Gavin Lee examines musical ambiguity as queer phenomenology. Queer persons are rebuffed by the normative world of people and objects and directed towards alternative forms of personal attachments, experiencing a “wonky” phenomenology of ambiguity through that redirection. The contradiction of musical embodiment in a work about Buddhist disembodiment (the queer composer John Sharpley’s Emptiness) is read as one modality of ambiguity, which is also discerned elsewhere in meter, harmony, and form. With an understanding of ambiguity as queer phenomenology, the resistance to musical ambiguity is read as heteronormative.

James Currie applies a theory of cruising as formalism—a social formation that functions without the participants having to get to know the various realities that constitute the content of the humans they are coming into relationship with—to a re- evaluation of the contemporary pejorative connotation of musical formalism. An examination of the formalism inherent in the social life of cruising affords a re-evaluation of the scripting of musical formalism as resistant to sociality, offering new insights to how musical form was always closer to human social life than anyone had thought.

Roger Mathew Grant examines musical formalism along the lines once coyly suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell—as a practice of “decadent aesthetes” who spend their time reveling in the inexorable complexities of art’s intangible qualities. Drawing on Mitchell and other literary theorists invested in formal analysis, a recontextualization of contemporary American music theory alongside queer practices of decadence and antiquarianism affords a re-evaluation of music theorists as cultural guardians rather than as “pedants” who spend hours measuring phrase lengths and codifying grammars.

Judith Peraino considers music theory’s deferral of live musical time in relation to the urge towards the audio/visual capture of popular music concerts among the “smart phone” generation, drawing in particular on the phenomenological redirection found in queer temporality andthe mediation of time by the technological “actor- network.” Musical time, embodiment, sociality, and text are profoundly altered by the lens of “tiny screens,” through which music is deferred to a time that is both “past” and “future” but never “present.”

Naomi Andre examines the conjunction of vocal timbre with gender, skin color, and historical narrative. The changing expression of masculinity from castrati to women’s operatic voices in the early nineteenth century is elucidated as a site of queer analysis. Further, the intersection of race with gender and sexuality, as expressed in vocal timbre, affords an examination of how new non-minstrel portrayals in operas composed since the 1980s provoke a re-examination of the “folk” as evinced in Gershwin’s conception of Porgy and Bess as an “American Folk Opera.”

Queering Musical Form (SMT 2015 panel abstract)

Marion Gook
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Fred Maus

2014’s “Queer Music Theory” special session discussed what is or can be specifically queer about music theory. With its traditional concern for musical form (broadly construed as the subject of music theory), music theory may provoke debate about how form mediates cultural “content”; a capacious notion of “content” can comprise sexuality, other types of identity, the dissolution of cultural categories themselves, and the very emergence of new conceptions of form. This broad cultural vista lends itself to a far-reaching investigation of the “meta” level at which musical form operates—on the level of mediation and epistemology; it is at this meta level that we investigate the queering of musical form.

At the inception of what we might recognize as queer music theory, musical form was brought together with sexuality content, most famously in the work of Susan McClary (1991) and Philip Brett (1997). This content was broadly narratological in that it commented on the nature of gender and sexuality as manifest in musical form. In so far as this work can be seen as addressing the content “in” form, as if form were a chalice for content, it unwittingly supports the conceptual separation of musical form from sexuality. One way to approach the hoary issue of form versus content is to address the notion of form as content, and to do so not merely on the level of producing empirical cultural content through hermeneutics, but by analyzing how form mediates sexuality-cultural content. What is it about the nature of musical form that avails it of content? How does the analysis of form mediate content?

Aside from the mediation of sexuality content, the queering of musical form takes place also on the level of rethinking the conceptual frame of what cultural content comprises—the very content which is mediated by form. This issue is of critical importance in that the outcome of form’s mediation depends crucially on what we think is being mediated. A key factor in this reconceptualization of cultural content has to do with cultural perspectives. We are familiar with the import of cultural “difference,” but difference is not as obvious as it may seem—perhaps “difference” itself can be queered? The cultural content called “difference” can be further parsed through: the cultural totality that cultural differences form, the emergence or production of difference, and the dissolution of difference. Musical form does not contain this difference, so much as form is predicated on an epistemology of cultural difference.

Ethnomusicology and Affect Theory: Disciplinary Implications (SEM 2015 panel abstract)

Katie Graber
Luis Manuel-Garcia
Ali Collen Neff
Gavin Lee, chair
Ian MacMillen
Matthew Sumera

The emergence of affect theory in the social sciences and humanities signals a shift in scholarship, one principally defined by a downgrading of the importance of language and signification, and the rise of material “force” and bodily consequences. This roundtable brings affect theory (as practiced by Brian Massumi, Sara Ahmed, Laurent Berlant, and others) to bear on longstanding ethnomusicological assumptions, in particular, conceptions of identity, embodiment, and agency. Among the various critical approaches to affect theory which we will present, two threads of thought stand out. First, the process-ontology of force implies change and the potential for a radical re-orientation of power dynamics, which problematizes the concepts of identity (being “identical” to one’s unchanging self) and resistance (what if inequality were no more?)—both key concerns in ethnomusicological fieldwork and writing. Affect theory articulates the capacity for connection and change through networks of media, music, sound, performance, listening, feeling, perception, and bodies. Second, Massumi’s controversial proposition that affect involves unmediated force in relation to the body is read against theories of cultural embodiment. Roundtable participants engage a range of investigations, including: audiovisual representations of war; voice, affect, and historical texts; identity and hybridity as mediated through musical sensation; the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, affective citizenship, and musical scenes; and, participant-observational approaches to racialized sensations of musical danger and aggression. Through our work, we address the broader methodological question: What are the promises, challenges and limitations of affect theory in relation to ethnomusicology, and vice versa?

Reassembling the Bird’s Eye View in Musicology (AMS 2019 panel abstract)

Daniel Chua
James Currie
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Martin Scherzinger
Gary Tomlinson

In the 90s, many scholars criticized the undertone of universality in musicology, understood to be manifest in a focus on Western music, with clandestine Eurocentric values embodied in ostensibly neutral, empirically-oriented accounts of canonic works. Universality was also diagnosed in a range of epistemologies—from 19^th-century musical aesthetics to pre-World War II comparative musicology which abstracted the world’s musical cultures into pitch systems.

This panel responds to the current musicological landscape, structured by many views which are not aligned under a hoary Eurocentric ideology. Poststructuralist musicological approaches to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability have disrupted the univocal Eurocentric voice, making space for a “global music history” that looks beyond the West. But a new set of epistemological problems have arisen around the ethical precept of difference (Bloechl et. al. eds. 2015) that have not been satisfactorily addressed. Most disturbing is the universalist demand for difference as embodied in disconnected parcels of “contextual politics” (Currie 2009)—in musicology, many forms of the bird’s eye view are conventionally understood to be misleading or oppressive. This has led in part to a scenario where there is little sense of an overarching frame of reference for approaching methodological contradictions which have emerged: e.g. identity as deeply held belief and as deconstructed, narratives of agency versus those of oppression. Furthermore, contextual politics have contributed to a misunderstanding of legitimate scholarship which operates at a (by now) unfamiliar epistemological register of large-scale forces, long time frames, and a global view, often performing systemic analyses that are incompatible with a cultural outlook premised on a human viewpoint. The concept of a heterogeneous “totality” advanced in this panel responds to an emerging consciousness that something other than “difference” may be needed to fully grasp a range of catastrophic forces that spell impending humanitarian disasters in the twenty-first century: global capitalism, neocolonialism, climate change, and technological disruption. Much is at stake in assembling, under a new dispensation, a musicological bird’s eye view.

Experts in this panel speak to the register of “totality” from various perspectives including: a revisionist Marxist view of Romantic transcendentalism as a defense against encroaching industrialism (James Currie); the colonial and neocolonial resonance of the epistemology of cultural relativism embraced in music research (Martin Scherzinger); issues in music historiography on a global scale (Thomas Irvine); the explanatory power of biocultural evolution for human nature as well as human difference (Gary Tomlinson); the ethical force of the notion of an “alien” musical otherness which compels us to articulate what a post-humanist musicology might entail (Daniel Chua); a musical work as itself a model of the heterogeneous totality termed “assemblage” by Deleuze and Guattari (Judith Lochhead); and, a methodology of contradictions within the totality, premised on Slavoj Žižek’s conception of the “parallax view” (Gavin Lee, chair). Through rigorous interrogation of received musicological wisdom, we discern misconceptions about and articulate the value of a reconstructed totality. This session of two hours comprises 10-minute position papers and ample time for floor discussion.

Provincializing Music Theory: Epistemic Frameworks for the New Comparativism (SMT 2020 panel abstract)

Amy Bauer
Gavin Lee, chair
John Roeder
Martin Scherzinger

Music theory today is structured by the legacy of European and North American epistemologies, deeply interwoven with a history of colonialism. This panel proposes new comparative frameworks that attempt to depart from these epistemologies.

A new kind of global comparativism is clearly emerging across the music disciplines today, including global music history (Strohm 2019) and comparative ethnomusicology (Wood 2018a, 2018b). In music theory, comparativism can be said to have taken place in the emergence of world music analysis, including the deployment of Western music-theoretical approaches to world music (Tenzer and Roeder 2011), a continued interest in interculturalism (Everett), and explicitly comparative frameworks used to discover universals or commonalities across musics and cultural sites (Margulis). While the new diversity is encouraging in some respects, the panel attempts to supplement these developments with new ethical and epistemological frameworks.

Following the postcolonial theory of Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), “provincializing” music theory as it is practiced (originally in Europe, but now globally) means destabilizing Eurocentric musical epistemology. This does not translate to a reflex turn to difference, however, as the latter term has been problematized as a function of commodification and colonial governance (Currie 2009, Scherzinger 2019). An anti-hegemonic and/or non-hierarchical comparativism would have to navigate similarity—and indeed universality—as well as difference, against the unstable ground of shifting but particularized epistemic contexts. This 180-min panel comprises four papers which adopt different angles in parsing comparativism in music theory. The four paper segments are followed by a response and floor discussion (the six segments are all 30-min in length).

The first paper (Martin Scherzinger) inverts the universalization of the Newtonian, unilinear conception of musical temporality (formalized in the 18^th century) that is persistently privileged, even as the relative temporality of other musics is articulated in music theory. In this epistemic context, this paper argues that the only option is to universalize the temporality of the cultural (African) other.

The second paper (Gavin Lee) regards sonic objects (such as the pentatonic scale) as a multiplicity that is found across history and around the world. A “global sonic genealogy” is premised on an ontology of circulation that counters the conception of cultural siloes and discrete cultural identities that emerged in the 16^th century (Sykes 2019).

The third paper (John Roeder) conducts a historically-grounded, cross-cultural comparative analysis of works of Chinese and German modernism. The personal interaction between two composers provides the justification for a spectrographic analysis of the flow of musical “energy” (qì in Taoist philosophy) in both Jia Daqun’s Whispers of a Gentle Wind and Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro sostenuto.

The fourth paper (Amy Bauer) recognizes the global dissemination of post-tonal compositional techniques, as seen in the work of Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. Global modernists circulate within a cosmopolitan musical space that privileges musics and musical languages of Western origin, and their complex output is often mischaracterized by an insistence on cultural difference.

Through “reverse” universality, circulation, and contextualization, these papers rethink “difference” and propose a series of epistemic correctives—unique to music theory—against unqualified applications and blanket condemnations of comparativism.