Abstract
The analytical framework of sound studies is transforming our understanding of the political force of music. Following the lead of scholars like Nina Eidsheim and Salomé Voegelin, this essay considers the resonating force of listening bodies as a central factor in the musical construction of political community. This essay traces the tradition of African American music from congregational gospel singing through early rhythm and blues up to the twenty-first-century rap of Kendrick Lamar, showing how particular musical techniques engage the bodies in the room, allowing communities of difference to find their rhythms together.
Highlights
The analytical framework of sound studies is transforming our understanding of the political force of music
This essay traces the tradition of African American music from congregational gospel singing through early rhythm and blues up to the twenty-first-century rap of Kendrick Lamar, showing how particular musical techniques engage the bodies in the room, allowing communities of difference to find their rhythms together
What happens to music when sound itself becomes an object of cultural analysis? What happens to the fields of popular music studies and American studies when music is disarticulated from the previous understanding of pitches, rhythms, and timbres into a collection of sounds? How does the reconceptualization of sound as a force field of relations change our understanding of the political force of musical beauty? Recent interventions in sound studies are beginning to influence the way that some music scholars, those interested in cultural musicology, think about the relations between music and political subjectivity
Summary
Peer Review: This invited article was reviewed by the issue’s guest editors. Copyright:. Where music studies has most often focused on an object—a recording, a score, an individual performance—recent sound studies work identifies its content as, in Sterne’s words, “types of sonic phenomena rather than as things-in-themselves.”[14] Sound studies scholar Salomé Voegelin insists that centering sound as the material for analysis does not move us fully away from the musical object but demands that we hear the object as fundamentally relational. Instead, this way of understanding musical sound reorients our own listening towards recognizing the musical object as a temporary and temporal instantiation of a set of social relations occurring at a particular historical moment.
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