Pathways for a Justice-Oriented Ethnomusicology

Dr. Andrew Snyder

Universidade Nova de Lisboa    

Dr. Katelyn Best

West Virginia University 

Reviewed by Brenda M. Romero, Susan M. Asai, and David A. McDonald

At The Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (2022) sought to articulate pathways for a “justice-oriented ethnomusicology” (ix). We, the book’s editors, therefore naturally felt inspired by the prompt of Rising Voices to elaborate our ethics, values, and commitments in relation to our field. The edited collection was a collaborative endeavor of different generations and viewpoints, primarily from within the realm of SEM, that examines musical activism in relation to diverse categories of oppression, including race, class, heteronormativity, and ableism, among others. Here we want to highlight two elements of what we see as, hopefully, the book’s main contributions to an ethnomusicology in which questions of social justice are central: listening lovingly, as described in Kyra Gaunt's chapter, and direct action, as elaborated in Andrew Snyder’s. These two frames were partly inspired by bell hooks and David Graeber respectively, the two scholars to whom the book is dedicated and who were lost to us soon before the book’s publication.

The terms form the first and the last “interrelated points of intervention” (4), including also radical inclusivity and coalition building, that David McDonald proposes in his introduction to the volume as forming both an organizing rationale for the book’s structure, as each section is thematically tied to one of these four terms, as well as a model for ethical action within and upon our field. Though listening does not necessarily lead in a linear progression to action, we propose a potential pathway in which listening lovingly to marginalized perspectives might lead to radical inclusivity that would break down oppressive barriers to participation. This in turn might create the foundation for coalition building, or the creation of horizontal networks of solidarity between diverse actors. These coalitions might then take on powerful organizations that structure our lives in the form of direct action, taking the reins of power beyond the normal political channels when they are unresponsive.

As the book emerged from SEM’s Crossroads Section for Difference and Representation, the project benefited from the possibility to listen to the diverse collection of scholars that make up the section beyond the work of its authors and editors—Brenda Romero, Susan Asai, David McDonald, Andrew Snyder, and Katelyn Best. Beyond the academic chapters, one unique element of the book was the invitation to senior ethnomusicologists in the section’s orbit to contribute autoethnographic essays meditating on how their experiences within the field have intersected with oppressive structures. Kyra Gaunt, Steven Loza, Charlotte Heth, Brenda Romero, Paul Austerlitz, and Susan Asai contributed moving accounts of their experiences either directly experiencing marginalization and discrimination within the field or coming to terms with the oppressions experienced by their interlocutors, what McDonald describes as a “textured narrative of trouble, trauma, and triumph” in ethnomusicology (5). The book proposes listening to the “truth telling” of others as fundamental to the imagination of political possibility.

Building from listening to radical inclusion and coalition building, McDonald argues that the “pathway for a justice-oriented ethnomusicology…must include direct action” (14). We intended the volume itself as a metaphorical direct action given its collaborative creative process, critical content, and justice-oriented framework. We strived to systematically unpack misrepresentations and inequities that extend beyond conducting research in an effort to expose deeply rooted structures of exclusion within ethnomusicology as a discipline, practice, and institution. We sought to reorient hierarchies of academic scholarship towards inclusion while emphasizing that our ethical responsibilities are not confined to our roles as researchers, but rather apply to all aspects of our ethnomusicological lives. 

Indeed, direct action is not (just) a metaphor. McDonald’s call is for a fundamental dismantling of ethnomusicology that goes far beyond simply the study of music in all cultural contexts. Rather, he asks, “What if SEM was reimagined as a collective of activist-scholars who use musical thought and behavior as a means through which to imagine and enact liberatory sound and politics? What if the institutions of ethnomusicology were each instruments of direct action?” (15). In the past years, it has been increasingly obvious that SEM is not above the political fray, from Danielle Brown’s letter to SEM during the Black Lives Matter Protest, which partly inspired At the Crossroads, to the democratic initiatives of the SEM Ceasefire Collective to push SEM to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. McDonald himself has certainly put words into action, from listening lovingly to direct action, as he was recently arrested during a peaceful protest demanding ceasefire, resulting in the charge of criminal trespassing and a ban from Indiana University campus for one year at the time of this writing. 

As the authors of this essay wrote in the book’s preface, we imagine that a “justice-oriented ethnomusicology” might become redundant and that ethnomusicology come formed by a clear vision of values, ethics, and commitments. But from listening to inclusivity, coalition building and direct action, we leave it to ethnomusicologists and those with whom they work to further imagine the pathway to a justice-oriented ethnomusicology, one that is fundamentally democratic, horizontal, and decolonial in ways that open up possibilities that we cannot yet imagine.

REFERENCES

Romero, Brenda M., Susan M. Asai, David A. McDonald, Andrew G. Snyder, Katelyn E. Best, eds. At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Reflecting on Commitments and Accountability in Academia

Dr. Kristi Hardman

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

“Indigenous researchers are more accountable, not only to their institutions, but also to their communities,” (118) stated Lester-Irabinna Rigny (1999), an Indigenous education scholar. Rigney is likely correct about this; as a white, settler/colonial academic, I had never paid much attention to whom or what I was accountable to until I began analyzing the music of Tanya Tagaq, an Inuk experimental vocalist. Initially, I felt uneasy about the possibility of writing about Tagaq’s music (and to some degree I still do), mainly because I am not from the same culture and I am trained mostly in Western music traditions. I ask myself regularly, does it make sense for me to write about her music? In researching Tagaq’s music, I needed to consider my commitments and who holds me accountable to ensure that appropriate research methods were at the forefront.

Accountability is a willingness to accept responsibility and account for one’s actions. As Rigney (1999) alludes, community is powerful for holding one accountable in their work. As a non-Indigenous academic, I felt that I lacked these kinds of community relationships. Yet, in his open letter “To All Who Should Be Concerned,” Dylan Robinson (2019) provides a list of communities that I recognized in my own life, communities to whom any scholar might be committed and held accountable: “to your students, to your colleagues, to your families” (141).

My students keep me accountable. I am committed to ensuring my students gain a global mindset from their music courses. It would be a disservice to my students to teach them solely through the lens of Western music traditions. As a music theory teacher, I sadly continue to hear sentiments from students, such as “We learn Western music because all music stems from it.” I am committed to opening my students up to greater possibilities of how we might interact with music from various cultures. Additionally, many of my students are from varying cultural backgrounds (that I may not even know of) and those students may resonate more with a different style of analysis than those stemming from European art music traditions. These commitments to my students keep me accountable for what I say and how I teach in and out of the classroom. 

My colleagues keep me accountable. I have built relationships with colleagues of varying backgrounds and opinions who I trust to hold me accountable. They will and have let me know if I could be doing better to achieve more ethical research goals. Additionally, I am committed to making music scholarship a more welcoming place for all. These commitments to my colleagues ensure that I regularly consider how I conduct research and who I cite.

My family keeps me accountable. I have family from non-European backgrounds. Using solely Eurocentric methods of research would not take into account the diversity in my own family. I regularly ask myself, what would they think of my research, and can I be proud to tell them what I am working on? I am committed to diversifying my research and teaching methods to honor the varying beliefs, backgrounds, and perspectives of my family members.

The makers of the music I research also hold me accountable, though differently perhaps than the people mentioned above. I have not yet interacted with the musicians and composers of the music about which I write, which means that I lack accountability via a personal relationship. My relationships with the music makers are instead imagined. But imagination is powerful, and they hold me accountable nonetheless. As I conduct research, I imagine what they might think about it. Would they be appalled or delighted that I am researching their music? Would they find value in how I research their music? Would they consider how I conduct research appropriate/respectful or not? I may never know their answers, but just asking these questions ensures I am committed to considering different, likely more appropriate, methods for research.

As Shawn Wilson (2008) has stated, “An Indigenous paradigm comes from the fundamental belief that knowledge is relational” (177). These are the relationships that I think about as I research and teach. I am committed to these relationships, and these relationships hold me accountable. When we are attentive to our commitments, it can provide a larger purpose for what we do in academia and why we do it. If you haven’t already, I hope you will also reflect on your commitments and on who holds you accountable in your work. 

REFERENCES

Rigney, Lester-Irabinna. 1999. “Internationalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles.” Wicazo Sa Review 14/2: 109–21.

Robinson, Dylan. 2019. “To All Who Should Be Concerned.” Intersections 39/1: 137–44. 

Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point, NS: Fernwood.

Feminist Ethnomusicology, Silence, and Ethnographic Solidarities

Dr. Sidra Lawrence

Bowling Green State University 

The colonial endeavor, as a set of interrelated violences, generated, among other things, a set of ideological frames for interpreting the lives of women in the Global South. Chandra Talpade Mohanty famously critiqued such viewing practices in her essay, “Under Western Eyes,” ([1984] 2003) in which she suggests that the perspective that is validated and legitimized by the Global North is skewing everything we see, and if we want to know more or know differently, we have to change the lens through which we engage with women’s experiences. My primary motivations as an ethnomusicologist are seeking to understand the technologies of silence—how women have gone unheard, misinterpreted, or misrepresented—and situating my listening within postcolonial feminist theories that critique colonizing ways of knowing and representing, while building upon local genealogies of thought. As someone who has spent much time writing and studying in Africa, I often approach these pursuits from the context of a historical tendency to overlook African women’s musical and sound worlds, their ways of communicating, and their goals and priorities. For me, a corrective account partially means listening to sounds that have not previously been considered worthy of study (Ochoa 2014), that have been silenced or unheard, and honoring those sounds as knowledge, and as productive of liberatory postures and intimate bonds. 

My research is rooted in feminist genealogies which theorizes personal experience   rigorously; connections between women are viewed as political and necessary solidarities that do the crucial labor of both critiquing interlocking systems of oppression and generating spaces of healing and intimacy through which coalitions are formed. Such feminist discourse takes seriously the accounts of those who speak differently or in modes not immediately intelligible to the dominant academy, and generates representative texts where theory and ethnographic details are regarded as mutual, interdependent, and emergent. Such work invites us to ask, what do women have to say about themselves? What expressive modes do they use? How do non-verbal performativities signal values and commitments? And where have representations of them created silences?  

In feminist discourse, listening to silence is extremely important. But what do you hear when you listen to silence? In 1999, feminist musicologist Suzanne Cusick wrote “Gender, Musicology, and Feminism,” in which she reflected on the history of musicology at the close of the 20th century. In this essay she outlined the gendered cultural politics of the discipline by re-telling the story of the founding meeting of the New York Musicological Society in 1930, the same society that in 1934 would become the American Musicological Society—a group that represents the institutionalization of US-based musicology (Cusick 1999, 471). This meeting was of great significance; like most historical moments, what happened in that room would define the course of the discipline, and the people in the room would be marked as foundational scholars. 

Yet, Cusick chose to re-tell this story not from the perspective of the scholars in the room, but from the perspective of young American composer, Ruth Crawford, who, when she went to attend the meeting, found that the doors had been closed to her. Cusick tells us that Crawford listened to the proceedings of the meeting from outside, with her chair positioned next to the closed doors. Charles Seeger, a founding member of the Society, and a principle architect of the American musicological tradition, later revealed that he had excluded her on purpose to avoid the criticism that musicology was “women’s work,” and to distance the discipline from associations with “emotionality, sensuality, and frivolity,” qualities that “would threaten musicology’s legitimacy” (Cusick 1999, 473).

So why did Cusick choose to tell the story of musicology in this way? First, historical accounts are not politically neutral. They represent partiality—they represent the perspective of the storyteller, and all stories are embedded in power structures. Secondly, since the beginning of the discipline, distinctions of “women’s work,” or “feminine ways of writing, thinking, or expressing” would orient scholars to what is considered a legitimate and serious form of knowledge production. Dominant conceptions of  knowledge are manufactured through regulatory systems that validate some voices while excluding others. And so the story of musicology has dual perspectives—the story of the people in the room and the story of the woman outside. Listening to a story from the perspective of the silenced and the hidden reveals a crucial dimension—one that tells not only what we didn’t hear but WHY we didn’t hear it—and that through listening, we can gauge the technologies of power implicit in knowledge production. 

As ethnomusicologists, our responsibility is often to listen otherwise, to listen beyond, and to listen across. Ethnographers tend to prioritize and value forms of communication that obscure expressive modes that are non-verbal, indirect, or nonlinear. Though academic ethnographers have spent tremendous time attending to problems of representation, we still often retain a bias for certain modalities of audibility, particularly speech. There are many levels of silence, and cloaking, and performative expression that articulate what is known but not said, or perhaps said indirectly.  

A commitment of solidarity to the people with whom I work means writing, speaking, and teaching in ways that honor their values, their relationships, and their goals. It means calling attention to how power continues to structure what is heard by the dominant academy. It means thinking both about global macro-conversations, policies, and regulations as well as micro-narratives of empowerment. Ethnographic solidarity is practicing expansive ways of listening to human connections, pondering the possibilities of intersubjectivity, and experiencing modes of expression that are more fully reflective of how people speak and listen, sing, move, and dance. Thinking not only about what we hear but what we do not. Through such vulnerable listening, we are opened to more ethical human engagements and representations.

To hear is a receptive posture: one bound up in how people share their worlds with us, the capacity to listen fully, and to share the intimacy of a willingness to open up to each other. Such attention and the willingness to listen otherwise, makes audible the mechanisms of regulation, or what Adrienne Rich called the “cartographies of silence” (1978)—the structures of power that determine who has the authority to speak, when they speak, and for whom they make claims. And in order to change how we are able to speak back to these regulations, we must call attention to them and honor the voices that whisper, the voices that are muted, and those that speak otherwise.  

REFERENCES

Cusick, Suzanne G. 1999. "Gender, Musicology and Feminism." In Rethinking Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, 471-482. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1984. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12 (3): 333–358. 

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “Under Western Eyes.” In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, 17-43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Durham: Duke University Press Books. 

Rich, Adrienne. 1978. “Cartographies of Silence.” In The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, 16-20. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.