Audible Empire edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan

8/20/2019 Audible Empire edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan

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Music, Global Politics, Critique

A U D I B L E

E M P I R E

Ronald Radano & Tejumola Olaniyan, editors


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A U D I B L E

E M P I R E


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R E F I G U R I N G A M E R I C A N M U S I C · A series edited by Ronald Radano and Josh KunCharles McGovern, contributing editor

Duke University Press · Durham and London · 2016


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A U D I B L E

E M P I R E Music, Global Politics, Critique

,


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© 2016 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Courtney Leigh Bakerypeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Audible empire : music, global politics, critique / Ronald Radano and ejumola Olaniyan,

editors.

pages cm — (Reguring American music)

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

978-0-8223-5986-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-6012-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7494-7 (e-book)

1. World music—Social aspects—History. 2. Imperialism—Social aspects—History.

3. World music—Political aspects—History. I. Radano, Ronald Michael, editor.

II. Olaniyan, ejumola, editor. III. Series: Reguring American music.

3916.925 2015

780.9—dc23 2015024232

Cover art: Detail o photo by Boulevard de la Photo. © Creative Market.

Duke University Press grateully acknowledges the support o Global Studies,

a member o the Institute or Regional and International Studies o the University o

Wisconsin–Madison, which provided unds toward the publication o this book.


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CONTENTS Acknowledgments · ix

Introduction: Hearing Empire—Imperial Listening · 1

. T E C H N O L O G I E S O F C I R C U L A T I O N

1 Decolonizing the Ear: Te ranscolonial Reverberations

o Vernacular Phonograph Music · 25

2 Smoking Hot: Cigarettes, Jazz, and the Productiono Global Imaginaries in Interwar Shanghai · 45

3 Circuit Listening: Grace Chang

and the Dawn o the Chinese 1960s · 66

.


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vi ·

. A U D I B L E D I S P L A C E M E N T S

4 Te Aesthetics o Allá: Listening Like a Sonidero · 95

5 Sound Legacy: Elsie Houston · 116

6 Imperial Aurality: Jazz, the Archive, and U.S. Empire · 135

7 Where Tey Came From: Reracializing Musicin the Empire o Silence · 161

.


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· vii

. C U L T U R A L P O L I C I E S A N D P O L I T I C S

I N T H E S O U N D M A R K E T

8 Di Eagle and di Bear: Who Gets to ell the Story o the Cold War? · 187

9 Currents o Revolutionary Conuence: A View rom

Cuba’s Hip Hop Festival · 209

10 ango as Intangible Cultural Heritage: Development, Diversity,

and the Values o Music in Buenos Aires · 225

11 Musical Economies o the Elusive Metropolis · 246


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viii ·

. A N T I C O L O N I A L I S M

12 Te Sound o Anticolonialism · 269

13 Rap, Race, Revolution: Post-9/11 Brown and a

Hip Hop Critique o Empire · 292

14 Echo and Anthem: Representing Sound, Music, and

Difference in wo Colonial Modern Novels · 314

15 onality as a Colonizing Force in Arica · 334

Discography · 357

Bibliography · 361

Contributors · 391

Index · 397


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x ·

During the initial months o the Circle, we hosted a series o workshops

and invited speakers, which culminated in a one-day event staged in collabo-

ration with colleagues at the University o Chicago. im Brennan was gener-

ous in his participation at our inaugural event. We are also grateul to the

Circle members oma Longinović and Morgan Luker and to our Chicago col-leagues Philip V. Bohlman, Melvin Butler, ravis Jackson, and Kaley Mason

or their participation in Madison and Chicago. Phil was generous in taking

the lead in organizing the event at Chicago’s Franke Institute.

Te present volume grew out o the Circle’s 2011 symposium, “Music-Race-

Empire,” which ocused on the transnational production o race through mu-

sical orm and practices. Te symposium brought together nearly two dozen

scholars rom across the United States, who presented or discussion and cri-

tique early versions o the essays compiled here. (Ko Agawu and MichaelDenning served as keynote speakers at the symposium.) Over the course o

the event and in ollow-up correspondence and revision, the topics broad-

ened beyond the particularities o race to involve a series o subjects relat-

ing to global politics (hence, the more encompassing subtitle o the present

volume). We extend our proound gratitude to all the participants, many o

whom contributed to Audible Empire. (Olivia Bloechl, Ian Condry, and John

Nimis were among those who congregated in Madison but could not join

us in the publication.) Tere would have been no book at all without thecontributors’ unwavering commitment. Te perceptive insights that all the

symposium participants brought to the project’s particular ocus were unail-

ingly inspiring, and the authors responded to requests or clarications and

revisions with understanding and admirable good cheer. Te symposium,

moreover, would not have been possible without the dedicated hard work

o all members o the Circle. Tanks especially go to Florence Bernault, B.

Venkat Mani, Rubén Medina, Lalita du Perron, and the visiting guest ravis

Jackson, who served as chairs and commentators. Additional support camerom several units: the School o Music, Department o English, Depart-

ment o Arican Languages and Literature, the Arican Diaspora and Atlantic

World Research Circle, and the Institute or Research in the Humanities.

We are, nally, very grateul to Ken Wissoker, our editor at Duke Uni-

versity Press, or taking on the book and or his expert guidance all through

the peer-review process. He ably selected two excellent anonymous reviewers

whose reports were engaging, detailed, and meticulous. We had the added

benet o an extended conversation with one o them, Steve Feld, who revealed

his role prior to a visit to Madison, which allowed us to engage in a valuable

ollow-up discussion during his stay. wo contributors, Jairo Moreno and


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· xi

Phil Bohlman, generously provided astute readings o the introduction, or

which we are also grateul.

We greatly appreciate the efforts o all those involved in helping us to draw

out the signicance o Audible Empire and or recognizing the timeliness and

importance o the volume. Publication o this book was made possible inpart by a subvention rom the University o Wisconsin–Madison’s Institute

or Regional and International Studies and its offi ce o Global Studies as part

o the initial Research Circle grant.

Ronald Radano and ejumola Olaniyan


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“Empire” is one o those wandering melodies o contemporary social and

cultural analysis, a key word that seems to show up again and again, in any

number o circumstances and settings. So of-repeated and overrehearsed is

“empire” that the term itsel can appear, at times, imperial in character, and in

its incessant display and repetition, it begins to take on qualities o abstrac-

tion. Te obsessive iteration o empire (as with a related term, neoliberalism)

leads to a loss o signicance; its meaning comes to seem ambiguous, its

power diminished. o propose now that empire be understood within the

sensory realm o the auditory might seem to risk perpetuating an already

INTRODUCTION Hearing Empire—Imperial Listening


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problematic tendency. For i the concept o empire has become too abstract

in its excessive usage, it would now appear, as a reerent o the sonorous, to

draw urther into the ether, aligning with immaterial orms and bringing im-

perial action and history into that which we cannot touch, eel, or see. Tis is

why, perhaps, historical studies o empire since, or example, Walter LaFeber,William Appleman Williams, and Eduardo Galeano have remained so mate-

rially grounded, having ocused on legacies o militarism and economy; why

Marxian studies o historical materialism have centered on the visible and

haptic; why Foucauldian interrogations o governmentality have targeted the

apparatuses o security and law and conceptions o sovereignty; why even the

critical turn bringing about British cultural, subaltern, and postcolonial stud-

ies have all typically asked the realms o human sound making to stay quiet.

Tis is work or the big boys. Matters o superstructure, stand to the rear!And yet i we simply pay attention or, better, give a listen—our metaphors

o knowledge are undamentally ocularcentric—we can begin to compre-

hend how the emergences o European imperial orders and the concomitant

rise o political democracies have also been matters o the ear. Sound studies

have heightened our attention to what we might call auditory signicance, to

the power and effect o sound’s production and its reception in the ormation

o social and political orders. In a oundational historical work, or exam-

ple, Alain Corbin demonstrates how village bells in nineteenth-century Francehad an ordering effect on the eel and character o town living. Te audible

clarity o a bell’s tone became the source o contests over Roman Catholic

and New Republic denitions o time, identiying the ocus o debates about

sound’s sacral and secular symbolism, as well as its ownership under law.

As a colonizing orce in the rise o empire, moreover, sound productions

became a key tool in imposing other orms o discipline and order. At the

outset, sound’s presence was anything but orderly. Occupations were inher-

ently noisy and chaotic, involving massive interventions o people, animals,materials, and things; o assembling, working, training, and discoursing; o

violence, negotiation, and engagement. In its participation in social order,

however, sound production quickly assumed a role in organizing human

behavior. Te Portuguese, British, and French empires were notorious or

their ability to translate, mangle, and otherwise appropriate the local terms

o places and people—“etish,” “caste,” “griot,” “Bombay,” “Peking”—to the

point o re-structuring terminological reerences o identication and sel-

knowing. Such discursive representations, in turn, inormed the emerg-

ing orders o vernacular musical knowledge beyond the church and court.

he second voyage o James Cook and the eighteenth-century tours o


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Europe by music writers such as Charles Burney, or example, contributed

to the aggregation o contested discourses o alterity in which music stood

centrally. In a seminal essay on the anthropology o the senses, moreover,

Constance Classen reports how auditory conquest succeeded in re-orienting

the sel-understanding o modern Andeans, who today “look nostalgicallyback on the pre-Conquest period as a golden aural/oral age when the world

was animated by sound.” From South Arica to Australia, as Mark M. Smith

has observed, British colonizers expanded the regulating power o outdoor

sound devices, employing them to structure work among aboriginal people

and to introduce temporal orders according to newly industrial impositions

o labor time.

As the audibility o imperial presence resonated outward, reaching into

the interstices o everyday social living and the structures o the economic, itsimultaneously inhabited and reoriented the character o domestic spaces at

home, turning its developments in science and technology inward, affecting

the sound and eel o those who were otherwise largely oblivious to goings-

on in the wider reaches o the world. Friedrich Kittler shows how nineteenth-

century explorations o requency rendered western musical practices into

orms o abstraction dislodged rom their historical moorings, obscuring the

contextual specicity o European orderings o “music.” Jonathan Sterne’s

important work on methods o listening and the shaping o hearing demon-strates how the new science o audibility served to discipline medical prac-

tices at this same historical moment, as it would later reorganize, through

the advances o various mediating devices, rom the telephone to the 3, the

very character o modern perceptions o sound. With these disciplines o

listening, audition technologies begin to structure a peculiar, auditory phe-

nomenology, a world in which, according to Georg Simmel, “the calculative

exactness o practical lie which the money economy has brought about

corresponds to the ideal o natural science to transorm the world into anarithmetic problem.” Tese early twentieth-century anxieties would amously

draw the concern o Teodor Adorno, in his pessimistic theorizing o regres-

sive tendencies in composition and aesthetic judgment, a world suffused and

inoculated by banality and repetition.

More sanguine portrayals o the condition o metropolitan listening show

how the orce o cold war–era technologies, rom the transistor to computer-

generated sound, have offered a healthy measure o the sense o liveliness and

pleasure in our listening lives, and together they have also inspired a reason-

able skepticism about all the negativity o a “culture industry” and its deleteri-

ous effects. Te prolieration o important recent studies, rom Michael Bull’s


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critical ethnography o radios and iPods to Kate Craword’s investigation into

social-media listening, has shed new light on the proound effects o sound’s

possibilities o pleasure and affect and has exposed the weariness o some o

the older claims about alse consciousness. At the same time, however, there is

a tendency in this same literature to lean toward celebration and, in the nameo a new (yet very old) kind o elite cosmopolitanism, to broadcast claims o

value according to a rich lexicon o subversive hipness. In this, Adorno has

become a con venient scapegoat in popular music studies writ large, as we

witness a seemingly magical world o metropolitan youth listening somehow

cordoned off rom the greater orces o global politics and political economy

that instantiate it and distribute value, affect, and distinction worldwide. What

might a critique o the imperial cast o global-metropolitan club culture look

like? We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, since 9/11, a new generation oscholars has turned its attention to the violent effects o sound production in

acts o militarism and, o equal importance, to the ways in which domestic

productions o popular music, in their interaction with discursive regimes o

mass media, reveal a spectral resonance o symbolic violence—what Matthew

Sumera aptly calls “war’s audiovisions.”

Our concerns about some o the problematic trajectories in what might

be called the neoliberal turn in sound and popular-music studies have in-

spired here a moment o reassessment and taking stock. In this collectionwe want to turn down the volume in the celebration o modern technologies

o sound, driven as much by a tolerance or capitalism’s inexorable climb as

by the playulness o social media and 3. We want to draw attention once

more to undamentally cultural matters o musical creativity. Tat is, we aim

to highlight specically human and, most typically, historical modes o au-

ditory action—o people perorming and making “music.” While working

rom the important accomplishments o sound studies outlined above, we

are also proposing in this volume a move away rom what we perceive as theexcessive tendencies in post–cold war cultural studies o sound production

in an effort to nd again material priority in the cultural and local. We are

attempting to locate the historicity o empire’s audible conditions that have

carried orth as resonances into the present.

Looking back, the narratives o modern western empires are tales in

which audibility conspicuously involved musical interventions carrying real

consequence in social and cultural activity. Military occupations, or exam-

ple, were not only noisy, but also ofen musical, whether appearing as part o

the religious exercises o indoctrination that sounded among seventeenth-

century Portuguese clerics in Central Arica or inside and outside the Span-


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ish cathedrals o early-modern Latin America. Geoffrey Baker outlines in a

ascinating study o colonial Cuzco, Peru, the many ways in which imperial

musical practices o Spanish colonizers transormed the Andean auditory

environment as it recast orders o musical knowledge and practice among

indigenous musicians.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, moreover, mili-tary advances by the British and then, a century later, by the French under

Napoleon (who brought with his colonizing assembly into Egypt a music

scholar and transcriber, Guillaume-André Villoteau) employed newly devel-

oped brass instruments in the repertories o the march. Appearing against

the background o a long tradition o musical militarism—or example, the

Janissary bands o the Ottomon urks—these newer, modern orms o plan-

gent blaring and blasting organized the behavior o marching and ghting

men as marches arose symbolically as an index o a newly constituted impe-rial sound. As Emily I. Dolan observes, musical militarism played an impor-

tant role in the reorientation o instrumental practices o the classical and

romantic orchestras, as European composers introduced a range o crowd-

pleasing techniques highlighting noisy displays and celebrating the glories o

empires o the past (e.g., Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale, an opera set in ancient

Rome) and oreign wanderings in the present (Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri

[1813]). Tese audible, imperial legacies, in turn, became absorbed aestheti-

cally in the taste preerences o the listening public and in the new practiceso orchestration. Hector Berlioz’s highly inuential theory o orchestration,

its conception o the orchestra as machine, and its hierarchical ordering o

the “race o instruments,” replete with personality traits, proposed the musi-

cian as a new orm o alienated labor servicing a dominant composer. “Tere

was certainly a new concept o orchestration,” Hugh Macdonald observes,

“manipulating the allocation o notes to create an effect unperceived by the

players themselves.”

Across the nineteenth century and into the modern, the imperial charac-ter o musical creativity expanded across the elds o public culture, giving

sensible orm to varieties o popular entertainment. In a literal and direct way,

the military brass band established the ormative basis or the instrumental

ensembles o nineteenth-century popular style, its duple metric patterns en-

couraging, in the new ashions o dance, conormity to regular, repetitious

stepping. By the turn o the twentieth century, march-based instrumental

conventions had dened the international sound o the West—together

with local perormance styles in colonial settings rom Nairobi to Mumbai

to Manila—its appeal increasingly attached to U.S. black musical practices

translated and incorporated into in Pan Alley song, which was circulated


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globally via mass-produced sheet music, player-piano rolls, and a new labor

class o proessional entertainers. Te widespread appeal o the bands led by

John Philip Sousa propose him as the rst imperial musician o modern pop-

ular culture, whose perormances and recordings o black-based “ragtime

song” and strains o imperialist nostalgia in the orm o a rivolous two-step,“Hiawatha” (1903), and other tunes o the exotic broadcast to the newly colo-

nized in East Asia and South America an audible signature o “America,” cast

in the spectral voices o those once enslaved or recently conquered.

Such rivolity also engendered critique. Adorno’s amiliar rendering

o early orms o in Pan Alley as part o a cultural “machine which rejects

anything untried as a risk” acquires a more protable interpretation in Peter

Szendy’s provocative reading o the pop song’s alluring banality. For Szendy,

these “ear worms” (harkening back not only to Mark wain, but also to CharlesIves’s “ear-stretching” exercises and a amous episode o Te wilight Zone)

seem so wondrous because they brought orth a sense o mass-produced

sound as a colonizing orce. What is diverting about the hit is the sense that

here, now, we encounter the commodity that speaks; it “speaks” to a popula-

tion colonized and governed by a naggingly compelling turn o phrase that

“comes to you just like that, without thinking about it, without wanting to,

sometimes without even knowing or recognizing what it is.” We can, nally,

trace such a conception o imperial sound across the modern and into thepresent, appearing today in the global indoctrination in U.S.-based orms o

racial authenticity that have appealed to popular musicians and audiences

worldwide, whether in the orm o the power ballads o Celine Dion still

dominating contemporary Lagos; in the song contests o Europe, the United

States, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere whose “voting rights” celebrate

as they call into question the effi cacy o democratic governance; or the mi-

metic circulation o black-inused club-culture beats and comedic practices

such as “gangnam style,” replete with sel-mocking gurations o a spectralminstrelsy.

Fair enough. What we’ve outlined thus ar is part and parcel o the con-

dition o auditory culture, a necessary observation that, on its own, might

give too much emphasis to qualities o dominance. It is too simple to merely

claim or empire a new sensory measure o audibility, as i in sound we will

gain a uller sense o the character and complexity o the imperial past. What

is audible about empire is part o a larger working logic: it is not only the

audibility o dominance; it is not simply the pernicious vibrations o rapacious

capitalists, the sound o bad men. Nor do we want to suggest that empire’s au-

dibility identies an exclusive, sonorous domain, as i this book discovers in


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the past and present previously unrecognized orms o sonic autonomy—a

sociopolitical “absolute sound.” Such a clear-cut separation rom the ocular

and haptic risks perpetuating alse dichotomies distinguishing the oral and

written, which have troubled music scholarship or decades and have been

vigorously critiqued in the new sense studies literature. By “audible empire,”we do not mean to suggest a discrete realm o sound to be observed sepa-

rately rom other territories o the imperial. Rather we seek to call attention

to the discernible qualities o the heard—that which one hears and listens

to—that condition imperial structurations and that reveal themselves as part

and parcel o the regimes o knowledge, understanding, and subjectivity key

to the constitution o both belonging and unevenness in the making o the

modern. We seek, in turn, to ip it the other way around: to inquire into

ways in which imperial structures help to modiy and produce qualities ohearing and to make a “music” discernible in the rst place. In this, we seek

to recognize multiple qualities and characteristics o the audible and to do so

dialectically, relationally. What we want to situate at the center o this volume

are the many activities o humanly organized, perormed sound that gener-

ate and reect the ordering project o European thought and its conception

o “music.”

Euro-western musical knowledge itsel conveys imperial power and in-

tent. It does so because its very conception and orm belong to the episte-mological orders and historical localities o its various emergences. As Brian

Hyer outlines in his magisterial essay “onality,” in the belletristic tradition

o European art music, theorists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centu-

ries conceived o tonality—the grammar and workings o modern, musical

practice—according to a metaphorical language consistent with their rames

o reerence and positions as subjects o the state. Rameau spoke metaphor-

ically o the hierarchical relations between tonic and dominant (the rst and

fh scale-degrees o the diatonic scale) as a orce o nature abiding by laws ogravity outlined by Newton; d’Alembert understood that same undamental

relation according to olactory metaphors o sourness and sweetness. It is,

perhaps, no surprise, then, that other writers would rame their conceptions

o tonal music according to metaphorical images o eudalism and imperial

rule, as in Momigny’s tonic “queen,” “the purpose o all purposes, the end o

all ends, or it is to her that the sceptre o the musical empire is entrusted.”

Beyond matters o tonality and syntax, the presumptions o value attached

to European art music would also interact with common conceptions o

world evolution, as in François-Joseph Fétis’s racial hierarchy o musical abil-

ity (inverting stereotypes o Aricans as “natural musicians”), which traces


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in a curious ashion to Alan Lomax’s cantometric theories o vocal quality,

geographic locale, and emotional character in the mid-twentieth century. As

Hyer writes, “Despite the intended comparisons with natural laws, then, these

‘Gesetze der onalität’ [laws o tonality] were social in basis: there is in act a

strong correlation between tonal theories and conservative ideologies.”

As a civilized and civilizing cultural orm, then, “music” turns away rom

its opposite, noise. In the sel-ashioning o Enlightenment thought, music’s

sonorous logic, complexity, and ormal symmetries replicate classical ide-

als: “a harmony o the spheres that established the ratios between planetary

orbits (later human souls) equaled those between sounds.” onality brought

into audible orm a naturalized, iconic civility, which, in turn, rendered that

which sounded different as many calamities o noise in need o discipline,

muting, silence. Te command to silence grew rom an effort to contain thedin—the noise o the “Negro,” “Chinaman,” and “lazy native”—commonly

portrayed in European travelogues over our centuries, together with those

interior, domestic orms o irrationality and difference within emerging em-

pires: the hysteria o women; the clatter o the rabble. (It is no coincidence

that the piano player in Marx’s Grundrisse is compared with the madman.)

But it is even more than that. As Veit Erlmann argues in his book Reason

and Resonance, the very idea o the rational, which Europe would hold up to

itsel as the height o civilization, would be constituted not in contrast but inrelation to the auditory. In this rendering, reason and resonance identiy twin

trajectories in the emergence o modernity, calling into question easy bina-

ries o ocular- and logocentrism. Idea and the ear orm in relation: what har-

mony would achieve as a civilizing orce, bringing aural conceptions o native

otherness into the auditory range o listeners in Vienna, Paris, and London,

developed rom an internal sense o difference, rom a musical version o

the exteriority-o-nationalism constituted within the interiority-o-racism

that Étienne Balibar has proposed as a undamental pattern in modern so-cieties o the West. “Reason,” the titular mark o European supremacy, grew

as a cohabitation and negotiation with resonance, an unreasonable auditory

phenomenon nonetheless central to modern society’s constitution. Tis po-

sitioning o music is akin to what Jean-Luc Nancy names sens, a politically

enabling listening, which has been re-ashioned by the contemporary music

theorists Jairo Moreno, Gavin Steingo, and Barry Shank as constitutive o an

audible making o the political, o, afer Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière,

a radically democratic “agonistic pluralism.”

Te audibility o reason—sonorous tonality assuming a place alongside

Enlightenment’s key gure o “light”—helps to explain why musical practices


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became so consequential in the many orms o struggle recorded under the

name “resistance” over the course o the modern era o western empire.

Te organizing orce o song served to center group commitments during the

French Revolution and the rise o British labor; musical practices orged

the social constitution o black subjects in the Americas as a racially iden-tiable “people,” and as an oppositional orce coalescing in highly charged

political settings, rom the rise o “yellow music” in 1930s Shanghai to the

claims o jazz as “Degenerate Art” in Nazi Germany. For decades, observers

have analyzed the power o music as an organizing political orce in a range

o settings, rom Rabindranath agore’s Te Home and the World (1919) to

Alejo Carpentier’s La Música en Cuba (1946) to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk

to Freedom: Te Autobiography o Nelson Mandela (2008). Te importance o

music making in political struggle has been subjected to critical scrutiny, rstin a scattering o texts, rom the pioneering studies o jazz by Sidney Finkel-

stein, Eric Hobsbawm, and Amiri Baraka, to what has become a urry o pub-

lication since British cultural studies and Arican American studies helped to

lead the shif away rom ormal analytical studies and open up a new kind o

criticism ocusing on music’s inuence in the constitution o public culture.

We need not rehearse the many important investigations that have character-

ized this important historical turn; they have become the critical literature o

a new, culturally based music studies crossing multiple disciplines. We mightunderscore once more, however, that these musical practices were as orceul

as orms o discipline as they were in organizing resistance. Critical musical

practices (and, indeed, the very activity o critical listening to radical art) are

never simply and merely oppositional. What Richard Middleton names “the

voice o the people” was and is “constitutive o modernity itsel (modernity as

it actually developed), its role not only reactive but also productive, not only

responsible to but also responsible or (that is, dialectically implicated in) its

own apparent negation.”

Te eld o ethnomusicology stands at the oreront among academic

music disciplines in its enduring commitment to representing the broad

range o human musicality. Since its inception in the 1950s, it has sought to

“assuage the traumas o three centuries o colonialism” and provide represen-

tation to the range o world traditions beyond the monuments o European

classical art. In its ambitions, ethnomusicology also aspired to a position o

musicological leadership; it was, in its heyday, as one o its leading scholars

put it, “a eld o study caught up in ascination with itsel.” And yet in its

ambitions toward progressive leadership, the discipline has sometimes ap-

peared naïvely oblivious to its own culpability in imperial projects, reecting


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a curiously unironic (and, perhaps, distinctively American) sense o virtue

and righteousness.

Ethnomusicology’s origins are commonly traced to the turn o the twen-

tieth century and identied with an intellectually diverse group o scholars

based in Berlin (with parallel initiatives appearing in the United States, Brit-ain, and elsewhere), who, through comparative methods grounded in social

evolutionary theory, worked together in pursuit o “questions about music

that are ounded in the concept o music as a cultural phenomenon, as a do-

main o human thought and behavior rather than as ‘art.’ ” Although these

comparative procedures were “unquestionably Eurocentric,” ounded on Eu-

rope’s colonial conquests (Germans in the Pacic Islands, the French and

Belgians in Arica, the British in India, the Dutch in the East Indies, etc.), and

enabled by a massive repository o recorded “specimens” o musical oreign-ness (most notably, the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv), they also developed

rom a shared ambition among a group o German intellectuals representing

a range o disciplines who aspired to learn how modes o musical practice

inormed the character o a complex, global hierarchy. In ways consistent

with the historical moment, these early scholars appealed “or rendering evo-

lution audible,” as Eric Ames aptly put it. “Te empire is proud o its colonies

and does everything in its power to exploit them materially,” observed Carl

Stump, one o the leaders o the Berlin School, in 1906. As a matter o course,“Phonographic records should not be lacking. . . . Such an [archive] is a nec-

essary corollary o our colonial aspirations in the highest sense.”

Afer World War II, as the center o western political power shifed more

securely to the United States, a diverse body o U.S. scholarship developed,

sharing an ideological resemblance in its commitments to Boasian cultural

relativism and an empirically based scientism inormed by German prece-

dents. Viewed together, the U.S. initiatives proposed a shif away rom the

comparative methods o the Berlin School in the name o a pluralistic musi-cal democracy curiously consistent with the “end o ideology” posture orient-

ing a broad range o 1960s-era scholarship, as it advocated ethnographic and

perormance-based methods or studying primarily nonwestern traditional

musics that had been neglected by musicology’s belletristic commitments.

It is interesting to observe, thereore, how at the same time that ethnomu-

sicology posed a challenge to European classicism and aestheticism, it also

established its own aesthetic-based hierarchies and musical canon—“the best

in all the world’s music,” as a leader in the eld put it—thus perpetuating an

imperial orm o knowledge that it had explicitly sought to critique.


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· 11

Ethnomusicology’s rise to prominence was ueled in large part by a cold

war–era inusion o ederal and private-oundation unding (Ford, Car-

negie, Rockeeller), which supported ethnographic research on world music

as part o an overarching mapping and analysis o global geographies, what

amously became known as area studies. Te discipline’s oreign investiga-tions tended to ollow U.S. geopolitical involvements and social movements,

while at the same time perpetuating the needs and expectations o college

and university music departments, where ethnomusicology programs were

typically housed. While research was highly varied, curricula typically avored

musical traditions with well-documented theoretical traditions that could

be compared with those o Europe: the notated, classical traditions o India,

China, Japan, Java, and the Middle East. Arican music studies also received

considerable attention in the context o black liberationist politics and effortsdocumenting Arican traditions, its teachings requently represented by schol-

ars with a grounding in jazz and blues (Alan Merriam, Richard Waterman,

Charles Keil); Latin America, and particularly Cuba, was or a long time

largely neglected by English-language researchers. What might have taken

shape according to a myriad o approaches requently conormed to inter-

pretive models grounded in the study o European art music. In many de-

partments, “world music” would be conceived as a kind o alternative to the

classical musical repertory. In place o the ve-hundred-year historical devel-opment o European style, students could take a sequence o classes similarly

ocused on ormal matters and, in the more established programs, acquire

musical “uency” in a oreign music, modeled afer oreign-language study.

In this way, the theoretical emphasis inherent to the eld’s rst emergence,

which would be pursued by a handul o radical scholars, would be largely

redirected to oreground the acquisition o musical knowledge. Te imperial

conditions o European art music study and practice—repertoire as ocus o

analysis; value and signicance determined by complexities o orm—alsoestablished the character o how ethnomusicology would play out as an aca-

demic discipline.

Te rise o Indonesian music studies offers a particularly conspicuous

demonstration o how the alignment o western political-economic inter-

ests and enduring high-cultural commitments to aestheticism and art led

to a voluminous body o scholarship dedicated to a seemingly unlikely cul-

tural territory. Scholarship on gamelan developed against the background

o seminal anthropological research in Southeast Asia and Oceania and

in large part through the pioneering efforts o Jaap Kunst, a Dutch musician


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12 ·

who, under the employ o the Netherlands’ colonial government, undertook

a series o studies o Indonesian music and musical instruments. Te Dutch

presence in Southeast Asia reached back to the seventeenth century, but it

was the discovery o a massive body o natural resources two hundred years

later that drove the colonizing mission o the Dutch East Indies. Te Dutchcolonial presence would affect and realign indigenous musical practices, its

changes developing “in inverse proportion to the King’s power—power that

was, o course, rapidly decreasing under Dutch colonial rule.” O particular

interest to Europeans were the traditions o gamelan orchestras, so much

so that an early British offi cial, Sir Tomas Stamord Raffl es (who ounded

Singapore), brought back to England an ensemble specially tuned to ac-

commodate European temperament and scales. But scholars such as Kunst

(and composers such as Claude Debussy and Colin McPhee) were drawn tothe gamelan or its inherent properties, leading to another kind o imperial

reordering, particularly afer World War II, in the distribution o these grand

ensembles o bronze percussion instruments to the orums o the western

conservatory and concert hall. At the same time that indigenous populations

wrested political control rom a recalcitrant Dutch government and sought,

through decades o domestic contest, to shape a sovereign Indonesia, western

students o Javanese and Balinese art music undertook scrupulously detailed

investigations o indigenous musical systems, whose scholastic represen-tations ofen appeared dislocated rom the political tumult inhabiting the

region. In college classrooms in the United States, moreover, as interest in

gamelan blossomed during the 1960s and 1970s, leading exponents with keen

awareness o Indonesia’s political struggles (exacerbated by western involve-

ments) aced their own struggles o teaching traditional practices at the risk

o “encouraging simple-minded pseudo-mysticism on the part o one’s stu-

dents.” Such a graphic disconnect between on-the-ground political realities

and lofy, academic extractions o “art” continues to trouble the wider eld oethnomusicology into the present, identiying an enduring imperial tendency

characterizing the discipline as a whole.

Te point o this overarching critique is not to denounce the good inten-

tions o a progressively minded music discipline and its many contributions

to knowledge. Nor do we want to downplay the critical orce o the eld as

a whole, which, through the many inspirational studies across the century—

rom the oundational work o the Berlin School to the inuential studies o

David McAllester, Bruno Nettl, John Blacking, Judith Becker, Anthony Seeger,

Steven Feld, Martin Stokes, Louise Meintjes, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, and

imothy aylor, to name just a ew—has made possible the study o music


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· 13

beyond European art in the rst place. Our aim, instead, is to call attention

to the depth and pervasiveness o imperial tendencies. Te audibility o

empire is hardly limited to colonizing inuences and realms o the oreign.

We can hear empire in the amiliar orders o the here and now—in episte-

mologies that structure and constitute our orms o knowledge acquisition;in our curricula and modes o pedagogy in the teaching o “world music”;

in the recordings o global pop; in the concert perormances o difference

that draw our curiosity and attention. So can we recognize the orce o the

imperial in the many gestures to “inclusion” that inorm recent historical

musicological investigations, which, in their attempts to acknowledge di-

erence—as in the creation o veritable global histories o music—reinscribe

and reinorce traditional center/periphery distinctions. Once again, it would

seem, musicology has the world by its tail, and in its enduring commitmentto Eurocentric conceptions o musical “art,” it stands orever tall. Just as we

seek to give presence to those sounding practices and musicalities previously

silenced, so can we also pay attention to the orces o empire that are consti-

tutive o musical conceptions and productions even in their most vocierous

orms o critique.

Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique thus proposes music as a

means o comprehending empire as an audible ormation, whose very au-

dibility draws the listener (and even the hearer) into a vast network o lan-guage, supra-linguistic sensory elds, regimes o knowledge, and new modes

o subjectivity. Empire’s audible ormation was constituted, in its loud and

voluble origins, by cultures o sound making, hearing, and listening that are

dizzying in their categorical diversities and spread. Sel-reexively, we must

acknowledge that this latter claim could be made at all only because the “di-

versity” and the spread became so widely available and could be known and

perceived as such. We know that was not always the case in the history o

music till the age o empire and the Industrial Revolution. Tis same his-torical process that made possible or the rst time in history the greatest

aggregation and speediest circulation o different kinds o knowledge about

the most diverse peoples, subjects, and places also wrought epochal changes

on the organization o music that still endure—stoutly, dynamically—two

centuries later.

central sonic story to our modern time, nally, it is about

the proound transormations, and there is hardly a more evocative and

energetic teller than Jacques Attali. In his Noise: he Political Economy o


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14 ·

Music—especially the ourth chapter, which is devoted to repetition as the

third stage in the history o music as a commodity orm—he details how, at

the end o the nineteenth century, the technological inventions o duplica-

tion and repetition rapidly became the preeminent mode o experiencing

music—the “consumption o replications.”

With recording, music becamea commodity, an object o exchange across vast spaces, “music without a

market” because the locally anchored use value it used to have was now

replaced by anonymous exchange over unknown borders o a transnational

market: what Steven Feld has amously dubbed “schizophonia.” In the re-

sulting global mass circulation and exchange o music, musicians had be-

come a symbol o a “nonideological multinationalism: esteemed in all o the

most cosmopolitan places o power, nanced by the institutions o the East

and West, they are the image o an art and science common to all o the greatmonologuing organizations.” Put sound repetition, mass circulation, and

monologue together and the result is a tame and tamed music, aesthetically

and politically. “Popular music and rock,” Attali says baldly, “have been re-

cuperated, colonized, sanitized.” Music in the age o repetition became a

most potent means o subjectication on an unprecedented scale; repetition

in all its ever sel-rening orms and speed remains the entrenched, distinc-

tive mode o music under the empire o industrial capitalism and its trans-

ormations so ar.It is hardly possible to understand the modern subject and subjectivity

outside o this vast soundscape. Te scholars whose essays we have collected

in this book astutely survey and interrogate the decidedly multivocal and

multidirectional circulations between and among sound, voices, bodies, ma-

chines, and institutions that the empire o political economy and its sonic

ace, the empire o musical repetition, engendered. O course, the vast range

o historically grounded national and transnational explorations collected

here can only be aintly gestured in Attali. More substantively, Attali was tooquick and too predictable to seek a way outside the economy o mass circula-

tion to rescue music and restore its meaning. Indeed, mass music has been

a potent catalyst in “consumer integration . . . cultural homogenization . . .

cultural normalization, and the disappearance o distinctive cultures.” I

it is hard to countenance how thereore a way out o the dystopia has to

resemble an earlier noncommercial, use- value stage o culturally distinctive

musics, it is not because o a ailure o imagination but o a well-considered

reusal to indulge in prophetic ancies serving only the ormalist unctions

o theoretical symmetry and completeness. What i the dystopia occasioned

by the empire o music as commodity demands a different conception o


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· 15

“distinctive,” “difference,” and “culture”? What i we re-estrange ambiguity so

that we can discover some o its productivity that we have orgotten or have

always missed? Te empire o the musically audible, the essays here tell us,

calls or critical arsenals or situated readings that are both historically an-

chored and conceptually daring, readings that, while being historically wellinormed, do not assume the sanctity o already well-known conceptual di-

rections o exploration.

We have provided, within our broad categories, one excellent handle to

begin engaging the problematics that the essays centrally explore. Neither the

categories nor the essays are in any inviolable order, so they reward entrance

rom any point; orward or backward, there are enriching and mutually il-

luminating overlaps between and among them. Musical repetition and its

global distribution, we have noted, are distinctive to the age o empire. Weconceive the enabling means o that transmission, the “technologies o cir-

culation,” very broadly, as the essays in part I show. From Michael Denning’s

masterly survey o the advent o electrical recordings in the early decades o

the twentieth century to Nan Enstad’s meticulous mapping o the itinerar-

ies o jazz and cigarettes in interwar Shanghai and Andrew F. Jones’s close

exploration o the transmission powers o genre and generic labels in 1960s

Chinese-language musicals in Hong Kong and aiwan, technologies o musi-

cal circulation are not just materials or commodities but also conceptual cat-egories. Te relationship is not one-sided: the technologies help circulate the

music, but music too was indispensable in the creation and dissemination o

technologies, commodities, ideas, styles, and cultures o aurality, affect, and

politics.

Te vast transnational ecology o musical creation, exchange, circulation,

and consumption thus created meant, however, that music could not but

have a most problematic relationship to space. Afer all, this was an age also

o remorseless boundaries, physical and social, between, among, and withinnations and peoples. Abrasive “audible displacements,” discussed in part II,

are what results rom empire’s dramatic impact on what Philip V. Bohlman

describes as the earlier recognized metaphysics o music’s mobility—the act

that it could move and be moved, be “spatially malleable and mobile.” His

tracings o the triangulations o race, music, and empire in diverse places,

rom the crowded slums o India to Romani borders, Brazilian avelas, and

imperial Basra in Iraq, are as poignant as they are insightul about that cru-

cial power o empire that has endured in its transormations: the capacity to

impose silence in a variety o ways, where there should be raucous noise and

the registration o its many labors and the corporeal and social garbs it bears.


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16 ·

In the disciplined silence we hear echoes o a certain kind o “listening” that

Jairo Moreno thoughtully maps out: an aurality, a kind o listening and hear-

ing that U.S. imperialism, its racialized nationalism and cultural insularity

(not just in popular attitudes but also in artistic and analytical discourses),

has instituted in the understanding o jazz since the last century. Highly dis-criminatory in the kind o inaudibility (and, indeed, invisibility) it engenders

(not just about others but also about itsel), this “imperial aurality” conscripts

listening in the ser vice o the nation, marshals a “worldliness” that is in reality

undergirded by U.S. particularities and interests and that sustains powerul

myths o national sel-suffi ciency and creative autonomy that are part and

parcel o U.S. exceptionalism.

Te challenge or us as scholars and researchers is to sharpen our listening

and hearing abilities. Both Micol Seigel and Josh Kun provide or us richlylayered instances o doing just that. Teir accounts o two exemplary musical

lives—respectively, the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston and Arnulo Aguilar,

the Mexican creator o Sonido Condor—graphically register the audible dis-

placements that occur when musical creators and their musics cross borders.

Houston in her time perormed across continents, in an entertainment in-

dustry that was acutely gendered and racialized and ull o both “possibilities

and limits or Aro-diasporic solidarity across the Americas.” Te narrowly

ragmented and ragmentary ways through which she has been appropri-ated by diverse constituencies over the years have been most revealing o

the stakes o audible displacements, as Seigel revealingly makes clear. Kun

distills rom his examination o the musical practice o the Mexican sonide-

ros (sound makers) across the borders o Mexico and the United States an

aesthetics o allá, a complicated gesture to a visionary place o potentially in

the now but yet unreached, a way o using recorded sound and audio tech-

nology “to engage with spatial politics in the age o asymmetrical economic

globalization, naturalized systems o deportation and border militarization,and intensive global migration and displacement.”

Over the past three and a hal decades, those asymmetries o economic

globalization have become so systemic that their context and circumstances

o generation and reproduction demanded a new naming or specication.

Te efforts o Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt proved evocative. “Empire”

beore was imperialism, the era o the dispersal abroad o basically European

national territorial boundaries with various orms o sovereignty shouldered

by a more or less unidirectional economic power and political inuence

between the colony and the metropole. In the new meaning, “empire” is the

name or the era o declining national sovereignty and the rule instead o


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· 17

“national and supranational organisms” that progressively envelop “the entire

global realm within its open, expanding rontiers.” Audible displacement in

the context o this empire, Gavin Steingo perceptively argues, is even more

insidious, and the scholar’s “listening and hearing” challenge becomes in-

nitely more complicated. In his multisided examination o the production,distribution, and consumption o contemporary South Arican kwaito music

under the broad umbrella o empire’s transormations in labor and labor re-

lations, he shows how empire is indeed audible in the music—we don’t have

to listen hard—but not in the songs themselves. How does one inside empire

critically listen when empire itsel “ ‘composes listening’ . . . structures and

organizes the relations through which kwaito becomes audible in the rst

place”? Te maw o the market is cavernous and its jaws are ever ready to

crush but this is hardly a write-off o enabling cultural politics, just a clear-headed, knie-edge accounting o what is possible and the limitations and

outright indeterminacies in what are, rom some perspectives, gains. Tis is

the tough critical outlook we learn rom both Penny Von Eschen’s examina-

tion o the poetics and politics o the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and

his “contrapuntal bassline to the hegemonic global dogma o privatization”

in the context o the end o the cold war and rom Morgan Luker’s investi-

gations o the contradictory (re)erasure that ofen inevitably accompanies

various offi cial and scholarly affi rmation and recognition o this or thatracial origin o tango in late nineteenth-century Argentina. Tis is also seen

in Marc Perry’s perceptive examination o the contemporary hip hop scene

and specically during the Hip Hop Festival in Cuba in 2000. Te chastening

but by no means dispiriting question he poses on “the elusive nature o both

empire and the promise o revolutionary alterities at the millennial turn” is

this: “Where indeed in the antipodal end might empire and revolution reside

in the current age o neoliberal capital?”

Te distinctive eature o the sound o empire—the sound that creates andis created by empire—is its constitutive productivity , its multiple transor-

mations and effects across vast and diverse boundaries. But, conceptually

speaking, this is so because o its other eature that is also constitutive: its

untamable susceptibility to relativization. Tis is a good thing, especially or

those in subordinate positions under its rule. As Brent Hayes Edwards astutely

shows, the intimidatingly vast nature o Hugh racey’s archive o colonial re-

cording notwithstanding, his edice wobbles in logic at critical points. And, in

any case, that vastness did not obviously intimidate anticolonial theorists and

writers who later on, by omission or commission, polemically ignored him

in their gurations o Arican music and Arican anticolonialism. In another


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18 ·

context and ocusing on another genre, prose ction, Amanda Weidman

cogently demonstrates a similar contestatory relationship between compet-

ing visions o sound in colonial India. She identies the central sonic tropes

o the “anthem” and the “echo” in, respectively, Rabindranath agore’s Te

Home and the World (1919) and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Te“anthem” is the nationalist’s dream o the “controlled, intentional, collective”

voice o the nation coming into being, while Forster’s “echo” speaks the “un-

controlled, unintentional,” and imponderable colonized India in the colonizer’s

imagination. But imperial sound’s susceptibility to relativization is not to be

taken or granted at all. A supple and exible empire is also, afer all, most

likely to be an enduring one, burdens, warts, and all. Since the ground o re-

sistance is veritably impure—it must o necessity work within the terrain it is

resisting against—only the hard work o conscious counteridentication andmisidentication can harvest the possibilities o a susceptible hegemony. A

def articulation o this challenge is seen in Nitasha Sharma’s consideration o

post-9/11 desi and Arab rappers caught between being co-opted and “never

ully co-opted” by “corporate colonization.” Most productively oundational

in his exploration is Ko Agawu’s account o the colonization o Arica by the

institution o European tonal thinking and practice since the 1840s. Institu-

tions, as entrenched, codied ways o ordering practices and relationships in

society, are inescapable. Tey enable. Tey could be quite unobtrusive andinvisible when they are not embodied in physical structures or not ormally

or conventionally so named. But they also dene and circumscribe and are

conserving and conservative. When their substantive content is affect-laden

such as music, the issue o orming and reorming institutions o that affec-

tive content becomes even more challenging. onal thinking and practice as

an institution was part o the colonizers’ “civilizing mission,” but the colo-

nized, afer a while, ound some voice and agency within it. Because many

scholars today, ar less bold, would stop at this “balancing” in their examina-tions o the afereffects o colonialism (their accounts o historical, unequal

encounters are always in the end balanced!), Agawu’s considered statement

on the loss column o the balance sheet is worth quoting at some length:

More tragically perhaps, we have overlooked or undervalued the

creative potential o a number o musical resources, resources that

have been consigned to the margins at various schools o music since

tonality took center stage as the desired modern language. Various useso nontempered scales, the possibilities opened up by overtone sing-

ing, echo-chamber effects associated with water drumming, subtle


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· 19

explorations o the boundaries between speech and song . . . and the

achievement o closure not through stepwise motion or a juvenile slow-

ing down but by the use o melodic leaps and the injection o rhythmic

lie: these and numerous others constitute a rich set o stylistic oppor-

tunities or the modern composer. We await an Arica-originated resis-tance to the easy victories that tonal harmony has won on the continent

since the 1840s.

“Audible” empire affi rms that empire constituted as much as it was constituted

by sound. o open up the audibility o empire as a problematic is to call or

a more capacious rethinking o the constitutive processes o empire as well

as o modern sound and its study. We invite readers to share in the wealth o

insights and sounds offered by our contributors.

1. Walter LaFeber, Te New Empire: An Interpretation o American Expansion, – (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963); William Appleman Williams, Teragedy o American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959); Eduardo Galeano,Open Veins o Latin America, trans. Cedric Belrage (1971; repr., New York: MonthlyReview, 1973).

2. Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the th-Century French Coun-tryside, trans. Martin Tom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

3. Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: Te Power o Music in Other Worlds (NewYork: Oxord University Press, 2008); Constance Classen, “Sweet Colors, FragrantSongs: Sensory Models o the Andes and the Amazon,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 4(November 1990): 724; Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, ast-ing, and ouching in History (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 2007), 46.

4. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone-Film-ypewriter , trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Youngand Michael Wutz (1986; repr., Stanord, CA: Stanord University Press, 1999), 24; Jona-

than Sterne, Te Auditory Past: Cultural Origins o Sound Reproduction (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2003); Sterne, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); GeorgSimmel, “Te Metropolis and Mental Lie,” in Te Sociology o Georg Simmel , trans.Kurt H. Wolff (1902–3; repr., Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 412. Among the most amouso Adorno’s commentaries is “On the Fetish Character o Music and the Regression inListening” (1938). Te best compilation o Adorno’s music writings is Adorno, Essayson Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 2002). “On theFetish Character” appears on pages 288–317.

5. Matthew Sumera, “War’s Audiovisions: Music, Affect, and the Representation o

Contemporary Conict” (PhD diss., University o Wisconsin, 2013). See also SteveGoodman, Sonic Warare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology o Fear (Cambridge: Press, 2012); and Juliette Volcler, Extremely Loud: Sound as a Weapon, trans. Carol Volk


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(2011; repr., New York: New Press, 2013). For a useul collection ocused largely ondomestic representations, see Jonathan Ritter and J. Martin Daughtry, eds., Music in thePost-/ World (New York: Routledge, 2007).

6. Geoffrey Baker, Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Dur-ham: Duke University Press, 2008).

7. Emily I. Dolan, Te Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the echnologies o imbre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 232. Dolan writes, “Music history hasound it easy to overlook how much this militaristic style dominated the sound o earlyromantic music, ignoring its overt political associations in order to create the amiliarstory o the emergence o ‘absolute music’ ” (228–29). Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz’sOrchestration reatise: A ranslation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2002), xxx–xxxi (“race o instruments” appears on page 296). For Berlioz’sascinatingly ambiguous portrait o Chinese music, in which he amously dismissesits aesthetic qualities while praising China’s commitment to musical traditions, see

“Moeurs musicales de la Chine (Musical Customs o China),” in Te Art o Music andOther Essays, trans. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1994), 176–79.

8. Frederick Schenker, “Navigating Musical Latitudes: Hearing Empire in theGlobal Circuits o Early wentieth-Century Popular Music” (paper presented at theInternational Association o the Study o Popular Music, Chapel Hill, NC, March13–16, 2014).

9. Max Horkheimer and Teodor W. Adorno, Dialectic o Enlightenment: Philosophi-cal Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1947; repr., Stan-

ord, CA: Stanord University Press, 2002), 106; Peter Szendy, Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox , trans. Will Bishop (2008; repr., New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 5.We might also think o these orms, cut loose rom copyright and ownership, as a kindo immaterial, ormless orm: organized sound giving cast to a new, auditory “secondnature.” For Ives’s “ear stretching,” see James Peter Burkholder, Charles Ives and HisWorld (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 18; Juliet A. Williams, “Onthe Popular Vote,” Political Research Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2005): 637–46; andLimor Shiman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge: Press, 2014).

10. Brian Hyer, “onality,” in Cambridge History o Western Music Teory , ed. Tomas

Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 726–52; imothy aylor,Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

11. Katharine Ellis, Te New Grove Dictionary o Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., s.v.“Fétis” (Oxord: Oxord University Press, 2001); Alan Lomax, “Folk Song Style,” Ameri-can Anthropologist 61 (1959): 927–54; Hyer, “onality.” See also Bennett Zon, Repre-senting Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY: Universityo Rochester Press, 2007); Julie Brown, ed., Western Music and Race (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2007).

12. Kittler, Gramophone-Film-ypewriter , 24.

13. Syed Hussein Alatas, Te Myth o the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1979);Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations o the Critique o Political Economy , trans. MartinNicolaus (1939; repr., London: Penguin, 1993), 305.


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chapter on repetition: “Te third network, that o repetition, appears at the end o thenineteenth century with the advent o recording. Tis technology, conceived as a way ostoring representation, created in fy years’ time, with the phonograph record, a neworganizational network or the economy o music. In this network, each spectator hasa solitary relation with a material object; the consumption o music is individualized,

a simulacrum o ritual sacrice, a blind spectacle. Te network is no longer a orm osociality, an opportunity or spectators to meet and communicate, but rather a toolmaking the individualized stockpiling o music possible on a huge scale. Here again, thenew network rst appears in music as the herald o a new stage in the organization ocapitalism, that o the repetitive mass production o all social relations” (32).

25. Ibid., 116. See also Steven Feld, “From Schizophonia to Schismogenesis: On theDiscourses and Commodication Practices o ‘World Music’ and ‘World Beat,’ ” in

Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues, ed. Charles Keil and Steven Feld (Chicago: Uni- versity o Chicago Press, 1994).

26. Attali, Noise, 116.27. Ibid., 109.28. Ibid., 111.29. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2000), xii. Hardt and Negri’s large structure-based reading o empire continuesto be oundationally apt and useul. It already and more suggestively incorporates theconcerns o content-based readers more immediately concerned about the subor-dination o different and local practices and epistemologies and the need or theirrecuperation and reurbishing. One interesting recent example o the latter is the “de-

colonial” movement, borrowing strands rom the long tradition o anticolonial andpostcolonial thinking but especially ocused on Latin America. See Walter D. Mignolo,Te Darker Side o the Renaissance: Literacy, erritoriality, and Colonization, 2nd ed.(Ann Arbor: University o Michigan Press, 2014), and Walter Mignolo and ArturoEscobar, eds., Globalization and the Decolonial Option (New York: Routledge, 2010).But “empire” was and is not against difference as such, conceived as local, regional,racial, or ethnic; it was, and remains, in act, the core engine or the manuacture, dis-semination, and exploitation o difference.

Audible Empire edited by Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan

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