Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Abstract

Over the past decade, the rise of public musicology and public music theory has been one of the most notable developments in music studies. Many music scholars now regularly publish in the news media; work with orchestras, festivals, and streaming companies; serve as expert witnesses; start small nonprofits; and participate in serious discussions about music on social media. For the contributors to this special forum, the increasing public relevance of music studies is certainly welcome, but it also raises numerous questions that our discipline has yet to discuss widely.The first set of questions is concerned with the purpose of public engagement for music scholars. Why do musicologists and music theorists want to engage an audience outside the academy? How do we address issues that are meaningful to the identity-, geography-, profession- or interest-based communities with which we choose to engage? To what extent are we trying to market our disciplines to wider audiences? And are we trying to promote social change and improve lives? The second set of questions relates to the hierarchies associated with knowledge production. Given that music studies often operates through a White racial and male gender frame, are we reinforcing inequitable hierarchies when we do public musicology?1 If this is the case, are we actively harming minoritized populations when we do our work? Additionally, what is the role of the music scholar when we engage with communities? How do we share authority with other stakeholders? And how do we effectively and ethically communicate with each other when different epistemologies are involved? A third set of questions revolves around the relationship between public music studies and work for academic publications. How will public work affect the topics academics choose to study? How will it change the content of music curricula and the nature of course assignments? How might public work diversify the types of methodologies music scholars use but also splinter the field even further?Exploring the simultaneously symbiotic and fraught relationship between public and academic history over the past forty years can be helpful for answering these questions.2 The professionalization of public history has certainly enlarged historians’ toolboxes and deepened discussions about ethics and community engagement. Recent academic research has enriched the interpretations available at many museums and historic sites. That said, a good number of academic historians are suspicious of public history's rigor and collaborations, and some public historians question academic history's relevance and social impact.A late October 2020 social media storm illustrates what is at stake when music scholars who are trained primarily in Western classical music engage in public debates about music from African American traditions. At that time, music theorist Robert Komaniecki asked fellow music scholars on Twitter and Facebook where the downbeat was in Ludacris and Timbaland's 2001 hit “Rollout (My Business).”3 It looked like a fun exercise, so one of the authors, Eric, and hundreds of others, participated in the Facebook poll and tweeted a quick comment about what he heard. He didn't think much about this for a few hours, but he kept getting notifications. Soon, the Society for Music Theory's Twitter account got in on the action. Within three days, a Florida producer named DiVinci had produced an eight-minute video that explored two ways of hearing the song.4 A year later, it has received over 15,000 views (compared to a few dozen views for most of his other videos). On November 13, 2020, the popular music theory vlog 12note created an even more thorough fourteen-minute video about the controversy.5 It has been viewed an astounding 284,000 times and received over 2,000 comments.As the discussion raged on, Eric started to get uncomfortable as a group of almost exclusively non-Black scholars, in the midst of a pivotal election, spent serious time applying mostly European concepts to a song by Black artists. Only a few commenters—among them K.E. Goldschmitt, Renee Jarreau, and Jon Silpayamanant—discussed the very obvious African and Afro-Caribbean influences (e.g., polyrhythms/polymeters, the clave rhythmic pattern, bell patterns) on the groove, or other non-Western ways of hearing the song. This is probably a reflection of the reality that not many music scholars on Twitter feel qualified to talk about non-European traditions. Even fewer tied issues of meaning to their discussions of rhythm. Ultimately, YouTube user Reydriel succinctly summed up Eric's feeling about the tenor of this discussion, “This just sounds like classically trained musicians getting confused by hiphop lmao.”At that time, Eric was reading Dylan Robinson's Hungry Listening, and this social media storm—which Komaniecki has dubbed #Ludagate—perfectly illustrated the book's thesis. Robinson, who is Stó:lō (a First Nations people inhabiting what settlers call the Fraser Valley in British Columbia), created the concept “hungry listening” by combining two Halq'em.ylem (the language of the Stó:lō and other Coast Salish peoples) words: shxwelitemelh—the methods of the White settler or, more precisely, “starving person”—and xwélalà:m, which means listening.6 He argues that the hungry listening used by people guided primarily by Western ontologies “prioritizes the capture and certainty of information over the affective feel, timbre, touch, and texture of sound.”7 When academics teach late-eighteenth-century European music, we often start with the “fact” of “sonata form,” but we have very little vocabulary to discuss how this music feels or what it can mean socially, politically, legally or medically. The problem is that this desire for certainty and information not only downplays the importance of multiple perspectives, but, more importantly, it forecloses the possibility of understanding the many ways in which different cultures use music. As an example, Robinson points to a British Columbia Supreme Court judge who refused to accept the idea that Indigenous laws that are, in effect, contained in song.Ultimately, the storm over Ludacris's “Rollout (My Business)” was exceptional in its virality but not in its approach. In working towards equity and social justice, music academics—and concomitantly public musicology/public music theory projects—have increased the representation of marginalized populations in curricula and research topics in recent years. However, our field has not adequately explored the influence or meaning that this increased representation should have. We have been very slow to recognize epistemologies, expertise, and analytical tools that are developed outside the academy, and to overhaul the narratives built on the “White racial frame” and what Alex Ross has called the “cult of the white-male hero.”8 As the videos by DiVinci and 12note demonstrate, the debate over the location of the downbeat in “Rollout (My Business)” can make for an effective lesson in either the college classroom or a public workshop. The problem is that it serves to reinforce the importance of music theory concepts developed in Western Europe and to erase the song's very African and Afro-Caribbean influences. Most obviously, the song's hook samples Africando, a New York-based salsa collective that includes musicians from Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali. By suggesting that Ludacris's “Rollout (My Business)” is best understood using concepts developed within the White racial frame, we are actively diminishing the contributions of Black culture and, ultimately, harming racial minorities.The contributors to this special forum want to develop progressive equity- and social justice-based public musicology and public music theory that collaborate on an equal footing with a wide array of communities. We want the primary beneficiaries of this work to be the members of communities with whom we engage. As Brian Sengdala writes in his contribution to this forum, “We must relinquish personal claims of ownership in order to center the communities with which we work. This concern must be foundational in any form of public engagement.”9 To be effective, we need to deal with two sets of difficult histories head-on. The first involves recognizing the ways that academic research has contributed to harming many minoritized communities and erasing their cultures and contributions. In thinking through this issue, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's “R-Words: Refusing Research” has been particularly helpful. This article focuses on problems in academic social science research but is highly applicable to public music studies. In it, they lay out three axioms for why “there is much value in working to subvert and avert the carrying out of social science research” among Othered communities.10 These are: The subaltern can speak, but is only invited to speak her/our pain;There are some forms of knowledge that the academy doesn't deserve; andResearch may not be the intervention that is needed.11Following Tuck and Yang, we argue that public music studies can promote equity and social justice only when we allow marginalized people to discuss their whole humanity with as little academic mediation as possible, when we do not treat marginalized communities as resources to be extracted, and when a project performs a useful intervention. One possible intervention is fundraising; a successful example is Stephan Pennington's four-hour Twitch lecture on Black music and the civil rights movement.12 Pennington's talk took place shortly after George Floyd's murder, and it raised over $10,000 for The Bail Project. It might also involve making difficult-to-find information and resources accessible. During the recent wave of anti-Asian discrimination, the Music of Asian America Research Center—which is dedicated to teaching Asian American history through music—gave many presentations about Asian American experiences and music-making during the Exclusion Era (1882–1943).13 The discussions of how Asian Americans resisted discrimination during this earlier period inspired many attendees and gave them ideas about what they need to do now. The essays in this forum will explore additional interventions that can benefit marginalized communities, including counter-storytelling (Henry), musical performance and podcasting (Hung), Wikipedia edits (Wilson), and family- and community-building (Sengdala). Sengdala's essay also forcefully argues that there are times when outside researchers would help the community most by staying out and not asking further questions.The second set of difficult histories is subject based and includes mass trauma, systemic oppression, the toll of climate change on the global South, and settler colonialism. They are difficult not only because they are emotionally charged topics, but also because many in our audiences will have flawed pre-existing frameworks—that they learned through school, mass media, or personal and familial stories—that heavily favor the viewpoints of those with power. To fight for equity and social justice, we need to help our audiences understand how these difficult histories continue to be relevant, and to try to persuade them to buy into alternate and more equitable ways of understanding these structures. To convince audience members of the validity of difficult histories and get them to change their beliefs, tone and narrative are of paramount concern. Recent research in political messaging demonstrates that, if we are to change people's minds about difficult histories, we cannot give into our anxieties about backlash. To be effective, we need to be explicit about difficult topics, especially race, gender, and class.Too often, progressives approach conversations about equity in a negative way. Let's use race and racism as our example. In many ways, it makes sense to approach racism from a negative angle, as we generally understand racism as a “bad thing” that one does not want to be perceived as embracing (we are using “racism” as a shorthand for the ways individual, interpersonal, and systemic racism manifest in and between people and groups of people).14 However, these kinds of conversations are regularly derailed by defensive participants and arguments over semantics. A second approach might be to say that “they” are racist, but “we” are not. This backfires for a number of reasons. It creates a false narrative that there are two diametrically opposed groups and therefore places these groups of people in conflict with one another. It effectively shuts down opportunities for persuasive conversations with people who seemingly disagree, an approach that can leave one exhausted and demoralized. If we can't change someone's mind about racism, what's the point of raising a challenge in the first place?There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that not everyone will believe that systemic racism exists or that they themselves have a part in upholding said racism. Some people will hold onto their individual racist notions throughout their lives. The two pieces of good news are that the dichotomy between “us” and “them” isn't nearly as impenetrable as we have been led to believe, and we need not think of rooting out and disrupting racism in terms of a negative framework or how we should not be.Mandi was speaking with her friend Zainab F. Chaudary, a communications and public relations professional, about this quagmire of racism and inequity in which we find ourselves. It was shortly after the last presidential election, and we were wrestling with the idea of progressives in a Biden-Harris administration. What would progressives be able to manifest in this largely centrist duo? How would progressives with their minds set on equity and justice for all engage mainstream Democrats and some Republicans to get things done? Zainab told Mandi that the Left—meaning anything left of center—has a branding problem. She said: The Right appeals to emotion, and they are fucking consistent. They're like a dog with a bone. The Left is very passionate, but the slogans they use don't have any meaning for most people. Short and punchy and catchy slogans aren't able to connect with people emotionally. No one remembers the catchy things on placards from the civil rights movement. But they remember the vision presented in “I Have a Dream.”15What exactly did Martin Luther King Jr. give us in “I Have a Dream,” and why has it stuck with so many of us for so long?Zainab then suggested that the work of Anat Shenker-Osorio might provide some answers. Shenker-Osorio is a Strategic Communications Consultant, the founder of ASO Communications, and an author and podcaster. She has created an approach that combines priming experiments, content testing, and online dial surveying, which she has successfully leveraged in key progressive elections.16 Her approach tells progressives that the “don't” or “no” messaging is not only negative, but it is reactive rather than proactive. Progressives spend too much time saying who they are not instead of defining what they want to build. She wrote, “To sustain long-term movements, we must shift from cataloging what we're resisting to painting a desirable portrait of the world we seek.”17 When we react and focus on the negative, we leave ourselves open to being defined by conservatives and centrists. What does it look like to take control of our own narrative?In collaboration with Ian Haney Lopez's Dog Whistle Politics, Demos, Lake Research Partners, and Brilliant Corners Research & Strategy, ASO Communications undertook a massive research project to answer this question (hereafter referred to as “Demos,” which published the project). They crafted multiple narratives, recorded audio versions, and then used dial surveying—the baseline starts at 50 and the number goes above or below that line to indicate a participant's self-reported reaction to each part of the narrative—to determine each one's effectiveness.Here are the key findings of Demos's study on how to talk about race and class in political messaging.18 Accepted knowledge says that the two are separate, and that explicitly talking about race and class divides more than it unites. So, Democrats and Progressives talk policy. Demos found that a race-class narrative that prioritized recognizing economic hardship and cross-race solidarity was not only appealing to the “base”—the 23% of people who already agree with progressive policies—but also swayed some of the “persuadables,” the 59% who shift between siding with the base and the opposition. The “opposition”—people who always disagree with progressive policy—represents a mere 18%; it is encouraging to know how small that number is. The base is primarily made up of Black and Latinx people as well as women. Meanwhile, the opposition is generally older White people; the persuadables were more likely to be younger men but were representative of the voting population's demographics.19 For the group Demos surveyed, the “winning” narrative states: No matter where we come from or what our color, most of us work hard for our families. But today, certain politicians and their greedy lobbyists hurt everyone by handing kickbacks to the rich, defunding our schools, and threatening our seniors with cuts to Medicare and Social Security. Then they turn around and point the finger for our hard times at poor families, Black people, and new immigrants. We need to join together with people from all walks of life to fight for our future, just like we won better wages, safer workplaces, and civil rights in our past. By joining together, we can elect new leaders who work for all of us, not just the wealthy few.20The narratives that received the most positive reactions across all groups had a few things in common: They explicitly talked about race and included Black, Brown, and White people;Named racial scapegoating as a tool that hurts everyone economically;Stressed the importance of unity and collective action to solve issues;Called back to previous times in history when cross-racial unity was successful; andTied the idea of working together to the idea of “Government for all.”21When testing “color blind” narratives against race-class narratives, Demos found that there was a greater positive impression across the base and persuadable groups when race and class were explicitly named together. Why does this work? Instead of talking about what progressives are not and do not want, getting bogged down in a defensive hole, these narratives make it difficult for the opposition to define progressives. They offer clear, definitive statements; even better, they invite everyone along. Being progressive is not a mystery club where some people fit and others do not. Everyone belongs until they remove themselves.That's the justification for social justice and equity work. Black and Brown people are already here, many women are already here, and many White people are willing to be here. Now, we need to know how to sell it. People support the messages that give them what they need, even if that message is difficult. This is a lesson we can apply to museums, archives, and public music studies projects.Now that we have some insight into the concepts we need for equity- and social justice-oriented narratives, let us discuss how we can create a sustainable movement. To help us envision a possible path forward, let us turn to conservative activist Grover Norquist, a driving force behind building contemporary conservative institutions. He developed theories for the movement, trained future generations, and crafted effective marketing strategies through symbols and language. Norquist first learned institutional building skills by attending the Leadership Institute, a 501(c)(3) that teaches conservative “political technology” through 47 different types of training schools, workshops, and seminars. On its website, one can request a speaker grant to “promote your conservative or libertarian values,” register for student conferences, and even apply for an activism kit. It is a slick, engaging, conservative machine, and one that shaped Norquist's future career.22In 1985, the Reagan Administration asked Norquist to form the ad hoc organization called Americans for Tax Reform (ATR).23 The organization first focused on refining its public messaging. ATR's guiding principle is tax reform on a grand scale. It “opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle,” and its primary goal is to reduce government revenues as a percentage of the GDP. As Norquist colorfully said, “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”24 Clever or at least memorable, this quip is often mentioned in think pieces about Norquist. The ATR's most important undertaking in its early years was the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. There are three different pledge documents: one for federal officeholders, one for governors, and one for state legislators.25 While the text varies slightly from pledge to pledge, the general thrust remains the same; the signers of the document promise to never raise taxes. The website description reads: By signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, candidates and incumbents make a written commitment to oppose any and all tax increases. While ATR has the role of promoting and monitoring the Pledge, the Taxpayer Protection Pledge is made to a candidate's constituents, who deserve to know where candidates stand on the tax issue. Since the Pledge is a prerequisite for many voters, it is considered binding as long as an individual holds the office for which he or she signed the Pledge.26Given this language, what conservative could resist it? The pledge turns dry, convoluted policy negotiations into your “word is your bond” level stuff. It has transformed pages of legalistic language into a sacred promise between politicians and you, the voter. Your duly elected official has promised you not to raise taxes for any reason. You think this is important. It's a prerequisite for you on voting day. If they break that promise, you know what to do.In the early 1990s, ATR also became a think tank that helped to develop the theories that continue to guide the conservative movement. This started when Norquist organized a series of Wednesday meetings at ATR to strategize against President Bill Clinton's healthcare plan. Eventually, these get-togethers grew into an “it spot” where conservatives wanted to be seen, a place for game-planning against government overreach, taxation, liberal bias, and anti-gun legislation.27 These strategies worked, and most of Clinton's most ambitious plans were thwarted. Yet, he still won reelection.In response, Norquist felt the need to create memorable symbols for the conservative movement, icons that can serve as shorthand for conservative ideas. Historically, the importance of symbols can be seen by studying the lifecycles of Confederate monuments. Following the fall of the Confederacy, abolition of slavery, failure of Reconstruction, and implementation of Jim Crow laws, memorials to the heroes of the “Lost Cause” were erected across the United States. Construction began in the 1890s but spiked during the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 1960s, as Black, Brown, and White Americans marched, boycotted, and litigated against segregation and institutional racism. The memorials are located nationwide, primarily in the South, but there was a Jefferson Davis Highway marker in Oregon (renamed in 2016), a Confederate Memorial Fountain in Montana (removed in 2017), and a myriad of buildings, roads, and rivers named after Robert E. Lee.28 All of these have been successfully used to promote a narrative of the past that, at best, centers a noble battle for “states’ rights” and, at worst, the lasting fantasy of benevolent slavery and White supremacy.Let us be clear: Black people have always understood these memorials as symbols of the racism inherent in the fabric of the United States. This is not a new development. What is new is that the majority no longer understand these statues as commemorations of a glorious South and its leaders. They have lost symbolic power, and many now consider them to be participation trophies given to the losing side, as well as reminders that the United States does not value Black lives. To put it bluntly, they are no longer “usable” symbols of White supremacy.What does “usable” mean? When memorials are built, they symbolize something: a specific person's ideals, an event in time, or even a feeling. Memorials to Lee, Jackson, or Davis let some viewers pull out the parts they liked, such as defense of home and hearth, and ignore what they did not, such as the defense of the institution of chattel slavery. Statues were visible shorthand for a South that would “rise again.” Viewers were meant to understand that even though Black people were no longer enslaved, White people still had all the power. White people controlled institutions from the local to federal levels, and there was little Black people could do about it. We have reached a point in time when the old narratives no longer hold up under scrutiny and society can no longer bear the significant psychological harm these symbols cause Black and Brown people.The recent dismantling of Lost Cause memorials is the result of work of broad coalitions, but symbols can also lose relevance in less active ways, such as changes in societal zeitgeists or the rise of alternate imagery. We can see this playing out now by looking at ATR/Grover Norquist's symbolization of Ronald Reagan—the process of making the former U.S. president a stand-in for small government and low taxation. In 1997, ATR founded the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project (RRLP) to “honor the 20th Century's greatest president with a memorial in every county in America.”29 The RRLP is the reason why we have a Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Norquist lobbied Congress, and the name was changed in 1998. Reagan's name graces a number of schools, roads, a mountain, and there are statues in Louisiana, Poland, and Hungary.30 When Mandi became aware of this project, she was looking forward to seeing what Norquist and the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, a project centered on memorialization, would say about the movement that pushed to remove Confederate statues. As it turns out, the website's last update was in 2018, and activity on the site had slowed to a trickle at least seven years earlier. Why?We suggest that Norquist could step back from the Reagan memorialization project for two reasons. First, it is no longer necessary to reinforce the symbolism. With the Tea Party gathering momentum in the 2010s, Reagan and Reaganomics were firmly entrenched in the identity of the GOP. During the 2015 presidential election cycle, Republican candidates Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Bobby Jindal declared that Ronald Regan was the greatest living president, despite the fact that Reagan had been dead for 11 years. Second, during and after his presidency, Donald Trump became the new galvanizing force in the GOP. For these reasons, Norquist could trim the parts of the machine that weren't producing new results. For a person who collaborated on Newt Gingrich's Contract with America and distilled tax policy into a pledge, this makes sense.Finally, Norquist's machine is now sustainable because it starts young conservatives early, connects them to other young conservatives to create a strong support network, establishes clear goals through the repetition of catch phrases, and adapts to new technology and techniques. There is a pipeline from youth to top conservative leaders and think tanks. Even if one does not end up at a major conservative outlet, the reliance on grassroots activism means that people never need to feel that what they do does not matter.So, what lessons can the building of the conservative machine provide for a fledgling equity-oriented public music studies movement? The answer is that we cannot rely just on good scholarship to build this subfield, although we do need that as well. Norquist showed us that a sustainable movement requires strong institutions that do three things: (1) develop guiding theories; (2) craft messages using symbols and engaging language; and (3) provide opportunities for on-the-ground training and networking.Learning from ATR's Wednesday meetings, we propose forming a coalition of equity- and social justice-oriented public musicologists and institutions that meet on a regular basis to develop strategy. This work involves agreeing upon a vision and setting specific priorities. If we are to change a dominant narrative or practice, we need to attack it from multiple angles. As musicology is fairly late to community engagement, we have the advantage of trying out a variety of models from public history, public science, journalism, nonprofit management, and other fields. Methodologies discussed in this forum's essays include counter-storytelling (Henry), autoethnography (Sengdala), public platforms (Wilson), and Commemorative Museum Pedagogy (Hung). Of course, these meetings can also involve creating and debating new public music studies theories. We imagine that the subfield can build many performance-based practices that are not common in other fields.Based on Eric's experience as an archivist, he can also recommend Helen Samuels's documentation strategy, which involves a coalition of archives that split up their responsibilities in order to create more comprehensive collections on a specific topic. In thinking about how we can apply this theory to public music studies, let's say that a coalition of public musicologists wants to work on the erasure of Black voices in country music. To maximize its impact, the group might want to agree on a few broad narratives and then create a series of projects