Institutional Voices, Silences, and Polyvocality in Music Studies

Javier Rivas (King’s College London)

 To bell hooks (1952 – 2021)

A commonplace trope in the current decolonial momentum is the use of terms such as “conversations” or “dialogues” (e.g., ICTM Dialogues 2021); understood as exchanges where different voices come together and listen to each other. In these conversations, sounding and hearing are considered key spheres for defining and subverting our different understandings of the world, sites where the silences resulting from coloniality and modernity are particularly audible. Danielle Brown’s groundbreaking project, “My People Tell Stories,” encourages people of color to “tell their stories in their own voices” (Our stories matter 2021). Other recent accounts of decolonization rely on the “voice” as a means to describe the workings – the literal utterances, expressed identities, possibilities and impossibilities to access and participate – of our knowledge system: Shzr Ee Tan (2021) recalls the “‘bloody immigrant’ struggles to find a voice in limbo” (1). Dave S.P. Thomas and Suhraiya Jivraj (2020) define decolonization as amplifying “those otherwise silenced voices [...] in the spirit of counter-story telling” (8); and Elijah Madiba (2021) as addressing “issues of agency in regard to the (re)claiming of symbolic and physical voice” (1). 

I have been interested for a while in how voice, language, and sound are performed in music studies and its institutional spaces. My doctoral research deals with these questions, in a context—Catalonia—where language choice carries explicit political meaning, and educational institutions are often seen as sites of language conflict. However, my interest in the voice stems as much from my research as from my specific and necessarily biased perspective as a foreign PhD student in the UK. As a non-native English speaker, my English is often perceived as “accented,” which can become a source of shame. Further, I have always struggled to even speak in the first place, feeling easily overwhelmed by multiple people and voices around me. Even now, after years of learning how to overcome these feelings, I still struggle to speak out in a room full of people, and feel particularly empathetic when I see peers and students in similar situations. 

bell hooks, who extensively encouraged educators to focus on “the issue of the voice,” wrote about how “many students in those institutions [privileged liberal arts colleges] feel they are entitled—that their voices deserve to be heard. But students in public institutions, mostly from working-class backgrounds, come to college assuming that professors see them as having nothing of value to say, no valuable contribution to make to a dialectical exchange of ideas” (1994, 149). Gaining access to an institution doesn’t equate to participation; being in a room doesn’t equate to being heard. These asymmetries clearly intersect with the gendered logics of our institutions: (white) men will often outnumber and outvoice women in lectures and meetings, dominating the conversations and creating a “substantial gender gap in voice and authority” (Karpowitz, Mendelberg and Shaker 2012, 533). In British higher education, initiatives like the conference “Silence will not protect us”—channeling Audre Lorde’s words (1977)—are contributing to a long-needed conversation on gender inequality and sexual violence in academia precisely through a focus on its voices and silences.

Any discussion about voices must problematize the idea that everyone is able to—under current institutional and educational conditions—make their voice heard:

Literate societies put huge stock in rhetorical ability—yet for reasons of alterity, disability, or disenfranchisement, some people do not speak well (by societal conventions), some are admonished for speaking too much (oversharing and making noise), some do not speak frequently (due to, say, shyness), some speak unusually (slowly or with a stutter, or via conspicuous technological assistance), some do not speak at all (from injury or trauma), and some speak but nevertheless go unheard. By the same token, some people hear (neuro)typically, whereas others hear less (by normative standards), hear differently (Deaf Gain), or hear too much (sensory overload, hyperacusis). None of these conditions should be grounds for depriving individuals of compassion and connection. (Cheng 2016, 8-9)

William Cheng’s Just Vibrations takes for its central concern the ethics of care and “sounding good” in academia and elsewhere. Cheng’s writings have influenced my efforts to figure out the issue of the voice, and more broadly my personal and professional ethics navigating academia as a graduate student and teaching assistant. Every classroom will have people who, as Cheng writes, “do not speak well (by societal conventions)” and/or are not given the space to speak in the first place. 

Against this reality, I would like to imagine how a “polyvocal” classroom would sound. Contemporary pedagogues have advocated for classrooms as communities of learners, where the teacher facilitates rather than lectures and, in doing so, becomes a co-learner. Yet the teacher taking a step back will not be enough if the structures of privilege and oppression are still standing and a few confident students with certain cultural capital keep outvoicing the others. In order for “no student [to remain] invisible,” as bell hooks (1994) puts it, we have “to hear each other (the sound of different voices), to listen to one another, in an exercise in recognition” (41). This demands collective responsibility, vulnerability, empathy, care ethics, and pedagogical work on sounding and hearing, building structures that “encourage the silent to speak, and the talkative to listen” (Hoffman 2018). Even when these structures are in place, some people might prefer to stay silent, or express themselves in other ways that are not talking, or in other spaces. What is needed, then, is a structure that accounts for the diverse forms of being and thinking that students might possess, one that doesn’t necessarily equate participation to speaking, but gives the opportunity to do so to everyone. 

An example of a potentially polyvocal academic space can be found in the ICTM, and in particular in its recent “decolonial dialogues.” In these dialogues, “world Englishes” (Kachru 1997) are spoken in the same (Zoom) room as Singlish, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Kichwa, Punjabi, or Igbo. This polyvocality demands new modes of careful and slow sounding and listening and radically different structures when intertwining languages that some people might not understand. These structures range from, for example, the use of pre-recorded talks with closed captions to the presence of interpreters or the own speakers repeating their words in different languages. Here, polyvocality opens the would-be-international (but too often exclusively Anglo-American) academic spaces to voices that would not be heard otherwise, mainly academics but also knowledge-bearers and audiences who might not speak English and/or feel intimidated or alienated by the idiosyncrasies of the academic ivory tower—but nevertheless have a lot to say. The fact that these “dialogues”—and similar academic spaces created during the Covid-19 pandemic—were held on Zoom also contributed to an increased participation of “those otherwise silenced voices” (Madiba 2021, 8), even if digital inequalities persisted. 

The institutional acknowledgment, promotion and amplification of this vocal diversity serves as a reassurance that all voices, languages, and knowledges belong in academia. Embracing vocal difference makes coloniality audible—“the imperial power sewn into the language” (Hong 2020, 97)—and unveils the neoliberal logics of hurried time and individualism in our spaces—“if you want to truly understand someone’s accented English, you have to slow down and listen with your body. You have to train your ears and offer them your full attention” (Hong 2020, 104). Depending on the context, “accented” English might break in through the walls of academia as a form of decolonial activism in itself. In the words of Alexander Douglas (2021), decolonial scholars such as Walter Mignolo engage “in the politics of resistance by virtue of a specific set of practices of resistance that include his use/s of the English language” (13; emphases in original). But I would invite you to listen to the voices and silences in other academic spaces, and beyond language diversity: in classrooms where not everyone gets a chance to speak; in universities and departments, reflecting on who gets access but also critically listening to who gets to have a voice and who doesn’t; in academic papers, films, blogposts and podcasts, carefully and caringly intertwining our voice with others and engaging with the long-standing discussions about the politics of citation/citation as a political practice (Ahmed 2013). The resulting “conversations” might be messy, difficult, or uncomfortable, but always preferable to a standardized way of performing academia that only works for a very particular demographic. 

While I was writing parts of this piece at my university’s canteen, I overheard a conversation between three students, two native English-speakers and one non-native. They were working on a class project. Not surprisingly, the native speakers dominated the conversation, sometimes showing a dismissive attitude towards the third student when they intervened with an accented English. Immediately, I painfully recalled similar situations in my life and the lives of my peers, when we were looked down on for speaking and thinking at a different pace and with a different accent, or felt too ashamed to speak at all. Sometimes the slowness, the speediness, the silence or the “vocal failure” (Wilbourne 2015) speak volumes about past trauma.

Not all situations of vocal abuse will be as explicitly audible as this one. Sometimes they might be more subtle and go unnoticed. I raise these points to encourage our engagement with the voices and silences not only in the field, but also within our own academic spaces. The decolonial moment has undoubtedly spurred institutional reflexivity, but a certain “collective averted gaze” (Wisniewski 2000, 5) towards the behaviors and values of higher education—one might say an “averted ear” towards its voices and silences—seems to remain. As music and sound scholars, we might already count on “aural capabilities” to “listen creatively and caringly” (Cheng 2016, 10) and therefore to effectively notice these abuses. Using these capabilities, we can propose alternative ways of sounding and hearing, and in doing so, learning together. 

References:

Ahmed, Sara. 2013. “Making Feminist Points.” Feminist Killjoys. Accessed December 5, 2021. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/.

Cheng, William. 2016. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Douglas, Alexander. 2021. “British ethnomusicology in the #BlackLivesMatter era: some (auto-ethnographic) reflections.” Ethnomusicology Forum 30 (1): 9–19. 

Feldman, Martha, Emily Wilbourne, Steven Rings, Brian Kane and James Q. Davies 2015. “Why Voice Now?” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68 (3): 653–85. 

Hoffman, David B. 2018. “Integral, Relational, Organic, And Generative: Pedagogy For A Thriving Democracy.” Forbes. Accessed December 5, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/civicnation/2018/03/15/integral-relational-organic-and-generative-pedagogy-for-a-thriving-democracy/?sh=33a50f59419e.

Hong, Cathy Park. 2020. Minor Feelings: A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition. London: Profile Books.

hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

ICTM. n.d. “ICTM Dialogues 2021: Programme.” Accessed December 5, 2021. https://www.ictmusic.org/dialogues2021/programme.

Kachru, Braj B. 1997. “World Englishes and English-Using communities.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 17: 66–87.

Karpowitz, Christopher F., Tali Mendelberg, and Lee Shaker. 2013. “Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation.” American Political Science Review 106 (3): 533–47.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 40–5. Berkeley: Crossing Press. 

Madiba, Elijah. 2021. “A collaborative approach to revitalization and the repatriation of isiXhosa music recordings archived at the International Library of African Music (ILAM) in South Africa.” Ethnomusicology Forum 30 (1): 52–62.

My People Tell Stories. n.d. “Our stories matter”. Accessed December 5, 2021. https://www.mypeopletellstories.com/our-vision.