Full Description
Every day, musicians and teachers use terms like "pitch," "scale," and "meter" to describe what music is made of and how it works. But what are the stories behind our musical terminology? Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures contends that seemingly neutral musical terms are entangled with human histories of oppression and resistance. Bringing together scholars from music theory, ethnomusicology, music history, and popular music studies, the book reads music history alongside critical philosophies of race and ethnic studies to illuminate the power structures that inform musical description and analysis across disciplines. With each chapter focusing on a single musical term, topics covered include: how ancient Greek philosophers used "harmony" to promote peaceful relationships between the ruling class and their subordinates; how sixteenth-century European colonizers perceived Indigenous groups as "dissonant;" and how nineteenth-century scholars measured "pitch" to form now-discredited scientific proof of Europe's cognitive and musical superiority over its colonized populations. Other chapters take a global perspective, examining theorizations of meter, scale, and musical texture in Japan, Iraq, Malawi, Georgia, and Central Africa. Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures brings these histories to light and is a crucial volume in creating antiracist futures for music studies.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction, by Jade Conlee
I. Reimagining
Epistemic Restlessness, by Daphne A. Brooks
Kinetic Orality, by Kyra D. Gaunt
Timbral Habitus, by José R. Torres-Ramos
Analysis, by Renata Yazzie
II. Critiquing
The Panaudicon, by Nina Sun Eidsheim
Consonance and Dissonance, by Andrew Chung
Pitch, by Daniel Walden
Heterophony, by Kwami Coleman
III. Decentering
Political Economy, by Bradford J. Garvey and Davindar Singh
Meter, by Martin Scherzinger
Scale, by Garrett Groesbeck
Polyphony, by Brian Fairley
IV. Reinterpreting
Harmony, by Robin James
Form, by Sam Reenan
Autonomy, by Derek Baron
Hermeneutics, by Matthew Mendez
Contributor Biographies
