Review: Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, by Ana María Ochoa Gautier

Abstract

Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia , by Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014. xiii, 266 pp. In this book aurality is both the subject matter and the methodology for scrutinizing the sonic history of nineteenth-century Colombia. More broadly, this two-pronged aurality is aimed at the “colonial archive,” a phrase frequently employed by Ochoa Gautier to encompass not only the material archive of travel writing, poetry, songs and song collections, grammars, and so on but also the political institutions and ideologies that produced or constrained those materials. The book includes numerous accounts of the kinds of listening practices that emerged in that period, ranging from those of Alexander von Humboldt to those of the novelist, grammarian, and politician Jorge Isaacs. But perhaps more strikingly Ochoa Gautier brings these disparate sources together through a kind of sonification of archival data, revealing a sonorous archive transformed into musicological scholarship not so much by analyzing notated music (although the history of musical notation itself plays an important role here) but rather by recognizing and drawing attention to the sonic qualities latent in less obvious sources of audible history such as linguistics texts. This sonification is not simply a question of expanding music studies to include sonic phenomena that are not typically considered to be music, though it does that too. It goes further, questioning the systems of inscription, codification, and listening—ideas such as pitch and the musical work—that have not only played foundational roles in musicology but also actively excluded other …