Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson Alexa Woloshyn (bio) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson University of Minnesota Press, 2020 Hungry Listening is a disciplinary reckoning. The book argues that settlers listen to Indigenous music and sounds through settler colonial musical logics. This book has two primary audiences: Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Some of the moments directed to Indigenous readers are open to non-Indigenous readers like myself to witness and learn. Others contain unexplained knowledge or exist in spaces where I am not invited. Robinson also directly asks non-Indigenous readers to name and reject settler logics of listening, composing, performing, and writing. Robinson hopes for transformative intersectional work between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. He models this intersectional work in Hungry Listening by drawing on multiple disciplines and speaking to multiple positionalities. The book title is a concept developed by Robinson, which he explains in the introduction. It is an English translation of two Halq'eméylem words: (1) shxwelítemelh ("the adjective for settler or white person's methods/things" [p. 2]), which is based on the word Stó:lō people (xwélmexw) used for starving White settlers in the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush; and (2) xwélalà:m (listening). Robinson also provides an overview of his critique of "inclusionary music" and "inclusionary performance" as musical contexts in which Indigenous content is mined for aesthetic interest and "fit"—or assimilated—into [End Page 119] Euro-American classical compositions and performances. Robinson offers an alternative model, "Indigenous + art music," which rejects assimilation and embraces incommensurability. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of a "tin ear," which reflects the settler listener's ability to perceive only Western ontologies of music. Thus, a "hungry listener" not only desires to consume but also to fit Indigenous content into something knowable and recognizable. Throughout the chapter, Robinson illustrates Indigenous and settler logics of listening. He argues for an unsettling of listening that embraces multisensory, flexible, non-teleological listening and does not appropriate Indigenous ways of listening. Read the introduction and chapter 1 before reading any subsequent chapters, including assigning any later chapters to students. Chapter 2 models an intersectional citational practice that emphasizes decolonial alliances among Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latinx, settler, and LBGTQ2 scholars. Robinson discusses examples of "performance writing," which he praises for challenging "the unmarked normatively of listening through explicitly marking listening positionality" (p. 81). This chapter challenges music scholars to explore sensory and affective writing approaches that can engage more deeply with our listening experiences. Robinson revisits some familiar musicology texts, asking us to embrace their nonnormative possibilities instead of merely citing them within normative structures. In chapter 3, Robinson positions his examples—colonial and contemporary—within a four-model taxonomy: integration, nation-to-nation music trading and reciprocal presentation, a combination of the first two, and coexistence without integration. This taxonomy will help analyze case studies beyond those included in Hungry Listening. Robinson presents case studies by non-Indigenous composers, in which Indigenous music and stories are forced awkwardly and violently into Western musical structures. In contrast, Mohawk composer Dawn Avery's piece "Sarabande" demonstrates "a sharpness of difference" (p. 143). Chapter 4 explains how the histories of Indigenous song collection enabled and justified Canadian composers' extraction of Indigenous songs as a resource to create so-called Canadian music. Robinson directs much of this chapter to Indigenous readers with the hopes that they together can find "different means by which [they] . . . might address this misuse of our songs" (p. 151). The chapter ends with a pointed critique of settler imaginings of the Inuit dogsled through an extensive event score for Alexina Louie's Take the Dog Sled. Chapter 5 critiques what Robinson calls "inclusionary performances" for trying to evoke feelings of reconciliation rather than take substantive actions toward nonrepresentational reconciliation. Robinson underlines what is at stake when settler audiences embrace [End Page 120] these feelings of reconciliation and do not push deeper: "For settler audience members, it may be a much easier task to embrace the mystery of Indigenous stories and aesthetics than to play a leading role in the eradication of another kind of mystery...