MUSIC 675: Critical Musicology and Cultural Theory

Estimated study time: 1 hr 12 min

Table of contents

These notes draw on Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (eds.) Music and the Racial Imagination (2000), Nina Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015), Kofi Agawu’s Representing African Music (2003), Georgina Born’s Music, Sound and Space (2013), Joseph Straus’s Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (2011), Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past (2003), and supplementary materials from Harvard University musicology graduate seminars and Princeton University graduate music humanities colloquia.

Chapter 1: New Musicology and the Cultural Turn

1.1 Displacing Positivism: What the New Musicology Rejected

For most of the twentieth century, Anglo-American academic musicology operated under the sign of what its critics would come to call positivism: a commitment to the recovery and documentation of historical facts — dates, sources, manuscript variants, biographical data — as the primary, and in some versions the exclusive, intellectual task of the discipline. The ideal product of positivist musicology was the critical edition: a scrupulously edited score with apparatus, establishing what the composer actually wrote, freed from the corruptions of later copyists and editors. The ideal musicologist was, in this sense, something like a philologist of sound: a guardian of textual authenticity rather than an interpreter of cultural meaning.

This paradigm had genuine achievements to its credit. The complete critical editions of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Schubert produced under this dispensation remain indispensable scholarly resources. Archival work of the highest calibre — recovered correspondence, newly identified autograph sources, reconstructed chronologies — has permanently illuminated our understanding of how pieces came to be. To dismiss all of this as mere fact-gathering would be both unfair and foolish, and the most thoughtful critics of positivism were careful to say so. What they objected to was not rigour, but the ideology of rigour: the claim that documentation is enough, that interpretation is necessarily subjective and therefore suspect, that the goal of the discipline is the reconstruction of a musical past purified of the interpreter’s present.

The critique of this paradigm gathered force throughout the 1980s, drawing on developments in literary studies, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and political thought that had already transformed adjacent humanistic disciplines. Hermeneutics — the theory and practice of interpretation — had been elaborated by Hans-Georg Gadamer into a philosophical framework in which understanding is always a fusion of the interpreter’s horizon with the horizon of the text. Semiotics, associated with Ferdinand de Saussure and extended by Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, provided tools for analyzing signs, codes, and conventions that operate beneath the level of compositional intention. Deconstruction, following Jacques Derrida, challenged the stable, self-present meaning that positivism implicitly presupposed. These currents, absorbed unevenly and at varying speeds by musicologists working in the 1980s, made possible a new kind of musicological inquiry: one that asked not only what music was, but what it means, and for whom, and in whose interests.

Definition 1.1 (New Musicology). The term New Musicology refers loosely to a group of critical approaches that emerged in Anglophone musicology during the 1980s and reached programmatic articulation in the early 1990s. New Musicologists share a rejection of the autonomy aesthetic — the idea that music is a self-contained, self-sufficient structure whose meaning is internal to its tonal relationships — and a commitment to situating musical works and practices within broader cultural, historical, and ideological contexts. The label was never a school with a manifesto; it covers a range of practitioners from the literary hermeneutics of Lawrence Kramer to the feminist analysis of Susan McClary to the ethnographic orientation of ethnomusicologists who moved into cultural theory.

1.2 Kerman’s Manifesto and the Call for Interpretation

The most influential single document in the emergence of the New Musicology was Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music (published in the United Kingdom as Musicology) of 1985. Kerman, a musicologist best known for his analytical work on Beethoven and his advocacy of opera as a dramatic form, surveyed the state of the discipline with a polemical eye. His central argument was simple and, to many of his colleagues, scandalous: musicology had become so focused on documents and sources that it had abandoned the obligation to interpret and evaluate music. It had, in effect, become afraid of criticism — afraid of the commitment to aesthetic judgment that interpretation requires.

Kerman’s polemic had several distinct targets. He criticized the positivist music historians who treated every date and biographical fact as equally significant and the act of evaluation as professionally improper. He criticized the music analysts — particularly the American theorists trained in Heinrich Schenker’s methods — for their absorption in technical formalism, their belief that the meaning of a piece was exhausted by the demonstration of its prolongational structure or motivic economy. He called for a musicology that would do what literary criticism and art history had already done: put the works themselves back at the centre, interpret them with respect to their full cultural and human meaning, and exercise genuine aesthetic judgment.

Remark 1.1 (Kerman's Limitations). It is worth noting that Kerman's call for interpretation was not yet a call for the specifically cultural and political interpretation that would characterize the most influential New Musicological work of the following decade. Kerman remained committed to the individual musical work as the primary object of study; his hermeneutics was closer to that of Lionel Trilling than to that of Fredric Jameson. The more radical turn — toward reading music as an instrument of ideological reproduction, toward attending to race, gender, class, and sexuality as constitutive of musical meaning — came from scholars who built on Kerman's opening but carried it considerably further than he had anticipated or, in some cases, welcomed.

The response to Kerman from the defenders of the “old” musicology, represented most prominently by Charles Rosen, was pointed. Rosen, the pianist and scholar whose The Classical Style (1971) represented the most sophisticated version of the score-based, close-analytical approach to musical history, argued that Kerman’s call for cultural criticism risked abandoning the discipline’s distinctive competence — rigorous engagement with musical structure — in favour of a woolly impressionism dressed in fashionable theoretical vocabulary. The debate between these positions shaped the intellectual climate of musicology throughout the 1990s and produced some of the most productive and most acrimonious exchanges in the discipline’s modern history.

1.3 The Autonomous Work and Its Ideology

Standing behind the positivist paradigm, and providing its philosophical underpinning, was the autonomous work concept: the idea that a musical work is an abstract, ideal object — the determinate structure of pitches, rhythms, and harmonies notated in a score — that exists independently of any particular performance, any specific listener, any historical or social context. On this view, the meaning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is internal to its pitch relationships and formal structure; it does not depend on when it was written, who performed it, or who heard it. The task of musicology, correspondingly, is to understand that internal structure as precisely as possible.

Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992) delivered the most philosophically rigorous critique of this concept. Drawing on the history of philosophy from Kant through Wittgenstein, Goehr argued that the autonomous work concept was not a timeless truth about the nature of music but a historical construction, one that emerged in Western Europe around 1800 — precisely the period of Beethoven, of the German Idealist philosophers, of the rise of the public concert hall and the practice of programming music for contemplative listening. Before this period, Goehr showed, musicians composed and performed according to quite different regulative ideals: music was embedded in social functions (church service, aristocratic entertainment, civic ceremony), and the notion that a piece was a fixed, repeatable object with determinate identity was neither consistently applied nor theoretically articulated.

Definition 1.2 (The Work Concept). Following Goehr, the work concept is a regulative concept in the Kantian sense: it functions as a norm governing musical practice rather than as a description of something that straightforwardly exists. Under the work concept, musicians are expected to be faithful to a score (the work's written representation), performances are evaluated as more or less adequate realizations of the work, and improvisation or alteration of the notated text is regarded as a deviation requiring justification. The work concept is thus constitutive of an entire social practice: it shapes how music is notated, performed, taught, criticized, and preserved.

The ideology of the autonomous work concept, as critics from Adorno to McClary have argued, is not politically neutral. By severing music from its social context, it naturalizes the aesthetic values of a particular class — the European bourgeoisie that built the concert hall system and the conservatory system in the nineteenth century — as universal and timeless. It places the Western art music canon at the apex of a hierarchy of musical value while rendering invisible the social conditions of its production. The musicology that maintains and reproduces this concept is, on this account, complicit in the reproduction of social power, even when it believes itself to be engaged in purely technical scholarship.

1.4 Hermeneutics, Close Reading, and Cultural Meaning

The alternatives proposed by New Musicologists were diverse, but several strands are particularly important. Lawrence Kramer, whose Music as Cultural Practice (1990) and subsequent books developed a rigorously hermeneutic approach, argued that musical works carry cultural meanings that can be reconstructed through a process analogous to the literary critic’s close reading. For Kramer, a piece of music contains what he calls hermeneutic windows — passages, moments, or features that are marked as invitations to interpretation, places where the cultural significance of the music becomes legible to a careful reader.

Leo Treitler brought historiographical sophistication to the question of musical meaning, emphasizing the irreducible historicity of musical experience: music means differently to different historical subjects, and the musicologist’s task is to reconstruct the conditions under which historical listeners and performers made sense of the music they encountered. Susan McClary, whose work is discussed extensively in the following chapter, brought feminist theory and cultural criticism to bear on the most canonical repertoire of Western music, showing that the gendered narratives embedded in sonata form and operatic convention were not incidental to the music but constitutive of it.

What unites these diverse practitioners is not a single method but a shared commitment: that the meaning of music is not exhausted by its formal structure, that historical and cultural context is not a merely external backdrop to be noted and set aside, and that the musicologist who ignores questions of power, ideology, gender, race, and class in the interest of “pure” technical analysis is not achieving objectivity but rather participating in the reproduction of a particular set of cultural assumptions. The New Musicology did not abandon close reading, historical rigor, or archival work; it embedded these practices within a broader critical framework that made their ideological stakes visible.

Remark 1.2 (Music as Cultural Practice vs. Music as Text). A useful way to characterize the methodological divide in contemporary musicology is to distinguish between music understood primarily as text — a stable, analyzable object whose meanings are internal to its structure — and music understood primarily as cultural practice — a set of socially embedded activities (composing, performing, listening, teaching, criticizing) whose meanings are relational, contextual, and historically variable. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and the most illuminating work in critical musicology tends to hold both in tension: it performs rigorous close reading of musical structures while insisting that those structures are themselves cultural artifacts whose meanings can only be fully understood in historical and social context.

1.5 What Critical Musicology Retains: Rigour without Positivism

A persistent misunderstanding of the New Musicological project holds that it abandoned scholarly rigour in favour of politically motivated interpretation — that once you allow cultural context, gender, race, and ideology into the analysis, you have simply given up on the ideal of truth and retreated into a kind of interpretive free play where any reading is as good as any other. This charge, levelled by critics from Carl Dahlhaus to Richard Taruskin in various registers, deserves a direct answer.

Critical musicology does not abandon the canons of scholarly evidence, argument, and accountability. It remains bound by the discipline’s commitment to historical accuracy: claims about what a composer wrote, when, for whom, and under what conditions are subject to the same evidentiary standards as in any branch of music history. Close reading of musical scores remains indispensable: you cannot argue that a passage embeds a particular ideology without showing, with precision, how the musical materials in question work and why they work that way. Archival research, source criticism, and the recovery of historical context remain essential tools: the cultural meanings of a work cannot be reconstructed in isolation from the conditions — institutional, economic, social, aesthetic — under which it was produced and received.

Example 1.1 (Taruskin's Criticism and Its Limits). Richard Taruskin's monumental Oxford History of Western Music (2005) represents an attempt to synthesize the New Musicological commitment to cultural context with the old musicological commitment to historical scholarship. Taruskin's approach is consistently attentive to the social, political, and institutional conditions of musical production; he reads musical works as documents of their historical moment rather than as timeless aesthetic objects. Yet he is also consistently skeptical of the more theoretically ambitious claims of the New Musicology — particularly McClary's gendered readings of musical form — which he regards as overreaching: projecting modern political categories onto historical materials in ways that tell us more about the present interpreter than about the historical work. Taruskin's critique is not without force, but it can itself be criticized for assuming that the ideal of historical reconstruction without present-day interpretive frameworks is achievable — an assumption that hermeneutic philosophy, from Gadamer onward, has given us strong reasons to doubt.

Chapter 2: Feminist Musicology and Music, Gender, and Sexuality

2.1 Feminine Endings and the Founding of Feminist Musicology

Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991) is arguably the most important single book in the history of the New Musicology. Its central provocation was elegant and scandalous: the structures of Western art music — sonata form, cadential conventions, tonal narrative — are not gender-neutral formalisms but gendered narratives that encode, reproduce, and naturalize ideologies of masculine authority and feminine subordination. To study music is, among other things, to study the inscription of gender in organized sound.

McClary’s reading of sonata form — the large-scale formal structure that governs the first movements of symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas from the Classical period onward — became the most discussed, and most contested, analytical argument in the book. In the standard sonata, the exposition presents two thematic areas: the first theme, in the tonic key, is typically more vigorous, assertive, and rhythmically active; the second theme, in the dominant or relative major, is typically more lyrical, cantabile, and melodically elaborate. The development section subjects the thematic material to harmonic instability and contrapuntal transformation; the recapitulation returns to the tonic, resolving the harmonic tension and re-presenting both themes in the home key.

Example 2.1 (Gendered Sonata Form). McClary argued that this formal schema maps onto a gendered narrative: the first theme is conventionally coded as "masculine" — active, forceful, harmonically stable, rhythmically driving; the second theme as "feminine" — lyrical, harmonically mobile, rhythmically supple. The development section enacts a drama of destabilization in which the "feminine" harmonic regions (the dominant, the relative major) are explored and ultimately rejected; the recapitulation enacts the "conquest" or normalization of this femininity by forcing the second theme into the tonic — the masculine home key. The sonata thus tells a story of masculine assertion, temporary feminine disruption, and the restoration of masculine order through the recapitulation. McClary supported this reading with close analyses of specific works, most controversially Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, whose first movement she described as musically enacting something close to sexual violence in its treatment of the second theme.

2.2 The Feminine Ending and Cadential Ideology

The book’s title refers to a specific technical feature of musical cadences. A cadence is the harmonic progression that closes a phrase or section, creating a sense of arrival and rest. The standard authentic cadence (dominant to tonic) creates a strong sense of closure when the tonic harmony arrives on a metrically strong beat — a pattern known as a masculine ending in the traditional theoretical vocabulary. When the tonic arrives on a metrically weak beat (beat two in duple time, beat two or three in triple time), the closure is weaker and the cadence is called a feminine ending.

Definition 2.1 (Masculine and Feminine Endings). In tonal music theory, a masculine ending is a cadence in which the final chord of resolution falls on a metrically strong beat (downbeat or primary accent). A feminine ending is a cadence in which the final chord falls on a metrically weak beat, typically after an extra syllable or note that extends the phrase beyond its expected terminus. The terms are traditional — they appear in German music theory as männlich and weiblich at least since the eighteenth century — and their gendered labels encode an evaluative hierarchy: strength and decisiveness are coded masculine; weakness and indecision are coded feminine.

McClary’s point was not simply to note that this vocabulary is gendered — that much is obvious — but to argue that the metaphors are not innocent. They encode a judgment about musical value in which the masculine ending, the decisive downbeat arrival, is normatively superior to the feminine ending, the weak-beat extension. She traced how these evaluative hierarchies operate not only in theoretical discourse but in compositional practice: composers consistently use masculine endings for moments of triumph, arrival, and resolution, and feminine endings for moments of pathos, irresolution, or lament. The technical apparatus of music theory is thus shot through with gender ideology in ways that are entirely invisible to analysts who treat the vocabulary as neutral description.

2.3 The Musical Canon and the Exclusion of Women Composers

Marcia Citron’s Gender and the Musical Canon (1993) shifted the focus from musical structure to musical institution: how did the canon of Western art music come to consist almost exclusively of works by men, and what role did musicological practice play in perpetuating this exclusion? Citron’s argument, developed through close attention to the careers of women composers from Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel to twentieth-century figures like Ruth Crawford Seeger, was that the canon was not a neutral repository of greatness but a social construction produced by the interactions of educational institutions, publishing houses, concert programming, critical discourse, and academic scholarship — all of which systematically disadvantaged women.

The exclusion of women from the canon was not achieved by a single mechanism. It operated through the informal socialization of the conservatory, where women were consistently steered toward performance and away from composition; through the evaluative vocabulary of criticism, which coded “greatness” in terms of formal ambition, structural complexity, and public scope that corresponded to the conditions of male compositional life; through the scholarly attention that shaped the historical record, determining whose manuscripts were preserved, edited, and published; and through concert programming that defined the repertoire by what had already been programmed. Citron’s intervention was to make these mechanisms visible and to insist that the canon’s apparent objectivity masked a deeply gendered social process.

Remark 2.1 (Essentialism vs. Constructionism). A persistent tension in feminist musicology concerns the category of the "woman composer." An essentialist approach might hold that women composers have a distinctive musical voice or aesthetic, traceable to their gendered experience, that distinguishes their works from those of men. A constructionist approach would argue that "woman composer" is itself a cultural category — that the traits attributed to women's music (lyricism, intimacy, attention to domestic scale) are the products of the conditions under which women were allowed to compose, not of any innate feminine aesthetic. Most feminist musicologists since the 1990s have favoured constructionist framings while remaining alert to the specific material conditions — access to training, to public performance, to publication — that have shaped the historical experience of women musicians.

2.4 Queer Musicology and Queering the Pitch

The collection Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994), edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary Thomas, extended the feminist musicological project in a new direction: toward the analysis of queerness in musical history, musical structure, and musical culture. The collection’s contributors argued that sexuality — specifically, non-normative sexuality — was as central a dimension of musical meaning as gender, and that the musicological silence on homosexuality in the lives and works of canonical composers was not a reflection of historical reality but of professional anxiety.

Philip Brett’s work on Benjamin Britten offered the most sustained example of queer musicological analysis. Brett argued that Britten’s homosexuality — lived in conditions of illegality in England until 1967, and experienced throughout his career as a source of both creativity and anguish — was audible in his music: in the choice of subject matter (Peter Grimes as the outcast artist, Billy Budd as the falsely accused innocent), in the characteristic harmonic language of unresolved dissonance and ambiguous tonality, and in the structural tensions between surface conformity and underlying resistance.

Example 2.2 (Queering Schubert). Maynard Solomon's research on Franz Schubert, published in 1989, presented documentary evidence suggesting that Schubert moved in circles of men associated with homosexuality and may himself have been homosexual. The musicological response was divided and sometimes acrimonious: some scholars welcomed the opportunity to reconsider Schubert's music in light of this biographical information, finding in the characteristic harmonic instability and tonal homesickness of the late piano sonatas and song cycles a musical register of the experience of social outsiderhood. Others objected that "outing" historical figures was anachronistic (the modern category of homosexual identity did not exist in Schubert's Vienna) or that biographical information was irrelevant to musical analysis. The debate illuminates a genuine methodological tension: between the desire to recover the full human reality of historical musicians and the danger of projecting modern identity categories onto historical subjects.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993), while not a work of academic musicology in the traditional sense, exerted considerable influence on queer musicological thinking. Koestenbaum analyzed the intense, often obsessive relationship between gay male culture and opera — particularly the culture of the diva — as a form of erotic identification in which the operatic voice became a vehicle for the expression and intensification of desires that the surrounding culture denied. The operatic voice, with its extreme register, its physical excess, its cultivated unnaturalness, offered gay male listeners a mirror for their own experience of spectacular difference.

Current directions in this field include trans musicology — the analysis of gender transition and trans experience in relation to vocal change and musical identity — intersectional approaches that attend to the ways race, class, and disability shape queer musical experience, and masculinity studies in music, which subject the normatively masculine positions of composer and conductor to the same critical scrutiny that feminist scholarship applied to the feminine.

Chapter 3: Race, Music, and the Racial Imagination

3.1 The Racial Imagination and Sonic Construction

The foundational premise of Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman’s Music and the Racial Imagination (2000) is both simple and far-reaching: race is not merely represented in music — depicted in lyrics, associated with performers, or attributed to genres — but is actively constructed through sound. Musical categories and racial categories are mutually constitutive: the organization of musical sound into genres, styles, and traditions simultaneously produces and reinforces racial taxonomies. “Jazz,” “classical music,” “blues,” “world music” — these are not innocent descriptions of sonic properties but cultural constructions in which racial meanings are embedded and reproduced.

Definition 3.1 (Racial Imagination). Radano and Bohlman use racial imagination to denote the complex of fantasies, projections, desires, and anxieties through which race is produced in relation to music. The racial imagination is not merely an individual prejudice but a structural feature of the cultural field: it shapes the categories through which music is heard, described, marketed, taught, and analyzed. It operates, crucially, in both directions: the construction of "Black music" as a category simultaneously constructs "white music" (typically unmarked, presented as universal) as its implicit counterpart.

3.2 Minstrelsy, Blackface, and the Sonic Construction of Blackness

Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993) provided the most influential analysis of the minstrel tradition and its ideological work. Minstrelsy — the performance of caricatured “blackness” by white performers in burnt-cork makeup, which was the dominant popular entertainment form in the United States from the 1830s through the late nineteenth century — was not simply a vehicle of racist mockery. Lott’s more complex argument was that minstrelsy was constituted by a double movement of desire and aversion: white performers and audiences were simultaneously fascinated by and repelled by the “blackness” they were constructing, projecting onto Black bodies a set of qualities — bodily expressiveness, sexual license, emotional immediacy — that the repressive demands of bourgeois white masculinity denied them.

This double movement had lasting consequences for the sonic organization of American culture. The qualities associated with minstrel “blackness” — rhythmic drive, spontaneity, emotional directness, embodied energy — became the defining characteristics of “authentic” Black music in the twentieth-century imagination. The mythology of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads, of blues as the natural expression of Black suffering, of jazz improvisation as instinctive rather than learned — all of these reproduce a racial imaginary whose roots lie in minstrelsy’s construction of “blackness” as something essentially different from, and in tension with, “white” rationality and control.

George Lipsitz’s Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (1994) extended this analysis in a different direction, attending to the ways that popular music enables what he called translocal solidarities: connections between communities in different places, built through shared musical vocabularies that do not erase local specificity but connect it to a broader cultural field. Lipsitz’s framework was less pessimistic than Adorno’s: he saw in popular music not merely ideological manipulation but genuine resources for community-building, political imagination, and cultural resistance.

3.3 Eidsheim and the Racialized Voice

Nina Eidsheim’s Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (2015) developed a powerful critique of the assumption that race can be heard in the voice — that a listener can identify the race of a singer from vocal timbre alone. This assumption is widespread: listeners regularly claim to “hear” that a singer is Black or white, and these perceptions often influence judgments of authenticity, belonging, and genre appropriateness. Eidsheim argued that this capacity, far from being a neutral perception of acoustic fact, is a trained interpretive habit that reproduces racial categories through the act of listening.

Remark 3.1 (The Training of Timbre). Eidsheim's central claim is that vocal timbre is not a natural property of a voice but a product of training, habituation, and stylistic convention. A classically trained soprano and a gospel singer with the same biological vocal apparatus will produce radically different timbres not because of racial difference but because of different vocal pedagogies, different physical habits, different relationships to breath and resonance. When listeners "hear" race in a voice, they are responding not to a biological signal but to the stylistic markers associated, through historical processes of racialization, with particular racial communities. The perception of racial voice is thus an instance of what Eidsheim calls thick listening: listening through layers of cultural interpretation that are invisible to the listener precisely because they feel like unmediated perception.

Eidsheim’s framework has implications that extend far beyond the voice. It suggests that the entire apparatus of musical genre — the set of sonic properties that allows listeners to identify a piece as jazz, or blues, or classical, or country — is a system of trained listening that encodes racial and cultural taxonomies. Genre listening is not perception of sonic properties alone; it is perception structured by a set of cultural expectations about which sounds belong to which communities, which musical practices are appropriate to which bodies, which sonic qualities count as authenticity markers for which audiences.

3.4 Agawu and the Ethnomusicological Construction of Africa

Kofi Agawu’s Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (2003) subjected the ethnomusicological literature on African music to a searching critical analysis. Agawu argued that despite its progressive self-presentation — its rejection of the crude evolutionism of nineteenth-century comparative musicology, its commitment to studying music on its own terms — twentieth-century ethnomusicology had reproduced a fundamental Eurocentric distortion in its construction of “African music” as a unitary object of study.

The construction of “African music” — as if the enormously diverse musical traditions of an entire continent could be subsumed under a single category — was itself an ideological act that denied African musical diversity while positioning Africa as the exotic Other against which Western musical rationality defined itself. Ethnomusicological descriptions emphasizing rhythm, communal participation, and the integration of music into everyday life — however well-intentioned — reproduced the same dichotomies that had organized colonial discourse about Africa: African body vs. Western mind, African community vs. Western individual, African spontaneity vs. Western composition.

Example 3.1 (Philip Ewell and Music Theory's White Racial Frame). Philip Ewell's paper "Music Theory's White Racial Frame" (2020, Music Theory Online) brought the analysis of racial ideology to the pedagogical core of music theory. Drawing on Joe Feagin's sociological concept of the white racial frame, Ewell argued that music theory in the American academy is organized around the assumption that Western tonal music — the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms — is the universal standard against which all other music is measured. This assumption reflects not a neutral judgment of musical value but the racial composition of the discipline's founding figures. Heinrich Schenker, whose analytical methods remain central to graduate music theory pedagogy, held explicitly racist views about the superiority of "Aryan" music; the discipline has largely refused to grapple with the relationship between these views and the analytical apparatus he developed. Ewell's paper provoked what became known as the "music theory wars" — a public controversy that demonstrated how politically charged seemingly technical questions of musical analysis can be.

3.5 Decolonial Music Theory

The decolonial project in music theory goes beyond the critique of individual theorists or texts. It asks whether the foundational categories of Western music theory — tonality, functional harmony, voice-leading, counterpoint — are universal descriptions of musical structure or culturally specific constructs that have been universalized through the global reach of Western colonial power. The assumption that tonal resolution, harmonic function, and metric regularity are the natural and inevitable features of music — features against which other musics are measured and found wanting — is an assumption that decolonial theorists argue can and must be dismantled.

This is not to deny that tonal music has its own internal logic and its own genuine aesthetic achievements. It is to insist that this logic and these achievements are historically and culturally particular, not universal, and that a discipline genuinely committed to understanding the full range of human musical practice must develop analytical frameworks adequate to musics that operate on entirely different principles.

Chapter 4: Postcolonial Musicology

4.1 Said, Orientalism, and Opera

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) argued that the Western scholarly and literary discourse on the “Orient” — the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia — was not a disinterested effort to describe and understand these cultures but a systematic production of knowledge that served the purposes of colonial domination. Said’s framework — Orientalism as the discourse through which the West produces knowledge of its Others in ways that justify its power over them — was rapidly applied to music, and with considerable explanatory yield.

Opera, in particular, proved to be a rich site for postcolonial analysis. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a remarkable series of operas set in “exotic” non-Western locations: Verdi’s Aida (Egypt), Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (Japan) and Turandot (China), Massenet’s Thaïs (Egypt), Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (ancient Israel). These works, composed for European audiences, constructed sonic images of non-Western cultures through a set of characteristic musical devices: pentatonic scales, modal harmonies, drone basses, irregular rhythms, parallel fourths and fifths — all understood as markers of exotic otherness by audiences who would never have heard the actual musics of Egypt or Japan.

Example 4.1 (Musical Exoticism in Puccini). Ralph Locke's Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (2009) offered a nuanced analysis of musical exoticism that went beyond simple condemnation. Locke identified what he called the all-the-music approach — attending to all the music in an opera, not just the passages marked as "exotic" — and used it to show that in works like Madama Butterfly, the musical characterization of the Japanese characters is considerably more complex than the Orientalist framework might suggest. Puccini used authentic Japanese melodies and adjusted his harmonic language substantially for the Japanese scenes; the result is a musically complex work whose Orientalism is inseparable from genuine musical curiosity about Japanese sound. This complexity does not excuse the work's ideological operations — its construction of Japanese femininity as sacrificial and passive, its endorsement of American imperial dominance — but it complicates the analyst's task and warns against the reduction of aesthetic complexity to ideological function alone.

4.2 World Music and the Politics of Global Difference

The category of world music — which emerged as a marketing label in 1987, when a group of British independent record labels met in a London pub to devise a term for non-Western popular musics — is one of the most ideologically loaded constructions in contemporary music culture. “World music” assembles under a single rubric the extraordinarily diverse musical traditions of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and indigenous peoples of the Americas and Pacific — traditions that have nothing in common except their difference from Anglo-American popular music and Western art music. The category is defined entirely by exclusion: world music is whatever is not “our” music.

Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh’s edited collection Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (2000) assembled a landmark set of essays interrogating the production of musical otherness in Western culture. The collection attended to the politics of appropriation — the question of when and how the adoption of non-Western musical elements by Western musicians constitutes exploitation of cultural resources to which they have no rightful claim — while resisting the reduction of every such adoption to a crime against authenticity. The question of musical appropriation is genuinely difficult: it involves disentangling questions of power, of economic benefit, of cultural respect, and of artistic creativity in ways that resist simple formulae.

Remark 4.1 (Decolonizing the Music Curriculum). The question of decolonizing the music curriculum has become a central concern in university music departments across the Global North since approximately 2015. At its most fundamental, the question asks: whose music is considered canonical and therefore worth studying in a formal music education, and why? A curriculum organized around the Austro-German symphonic tradition from Haydn to Brahms, supplemented by Italian opera and French Impressionism, reflects the historical dominance of European music in the academic music world — a dominance that was itself a product of colonial and imperial power. Decolonizing the curriculum does not simply mean adding a "world music" survey course; it means rethinking the foundational assumptions of musical value, historical significance, and analytical method that organize music education at every level.

4.3 The Subaltern in Musicology

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?” posed in her landmark 1988 essay, resonates powerfully in the context of postcolonial musicology. The question is not whether subordinated peoples have voices — of course they do — but whether the institutional and discursive frameworks of academic knowledge production allow those voices to be heard on their own terms. When a Western ethnomusicologist studies a non-Western musical tradition — however carefully, however sympathetically, however rigorously — there is always a question about whether the resulting scholarship translates the tradition into terms that are legible to a Western academic audience while rendering illegible precisely those aspects of the tradition that are most locally significant.

Jocelyne Guilbault’s work on zouk and other Caribbean popular musics examined how musicians from small island nations negotiate the politics of style in a globalized music market, using sonic choices — which instruments to employ, which rhythmic patterns to foreground, which languages to sing in — to assert cultural sovereignty against the homogenizing pressures of transnational media capital. Her analysis showed that the political economy of world music is not a simple story of Western consumption destroying authentic local musics; the picture is more complex, with local musicians sometimes strategically deploying “world music” framing to gain access to international audiences while maintaining locally significant aesthetic commitments.

4.4 Hybridity, Mimicry, and Musical Bhabha

Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory introduced two concepts — hybridity and mimicry — that have proven productive for musicological analysis of colonial and postcolonial musical situations. Mimicry, in Bhabha’s framework, describes the relationship of colonized subjects to colonial culture: they are incited to imitate the colonizer — to speak the colonizer’s language, adopt the colonizer’s customs, acquire the colonizer’s aesthetic standards — but the imitation is never quite perfect, never quite identical, always “almost the same but not quite.” This imperfect imitation is not merely a failure; it constitutes, Bhabha argues, a form of subtle subversion: the mimic man reveals the constructed, performative character of the colonial identity he imitates.

In music, mimicry takes the form of colonized musicians being encouraged to compose or perform in European classical styles — demonstrating their cultural sophistication through command of the colonizer’s musical language — while always being evaluated against the standard of the European original and found, however slightly, wanting. The postcolonial composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — from the Brazilian Carlos Gomes (whose operas were performed at La Scala) to the Indian Ravi Shankar in his early classical training — navigated this mimicry with varying degrees of conscious strategy and forced accommodation.

Remark 4.2 (Hybridity in Postcolonial Music). Hybridity, for Bhabha, describes the cultural space produced by the encounter between colonizer and colonized — a space that is neither purely one nor purely the other, but a third term that escapes the binary. In music, hybridity is often invoked to describe the mixing of Western and non-Western musical elements: the incorporation of jazz harmonies into West African highlife, the use of Indian rhythmic cycles in jazz fusion, the fusion of Andean melody with European harmonic practice in Latin American art music. The concept is double-edged: hybridity can describe a genuine creative negotiation between musical traditions, a third space of productive encounter; or it can become a romanticized celebration of mixture that ignores the asymmetrical power relations in which cultural mixing always takes place.

Chapter 5: Disability and Music

5.1 Disability Studies and the Social Model

The application of disability studies to music is, among the critical approaches surveyed in this course, the most recent and in some ways the most conceptually challenging. Disability studies emerged as an academic field in the 1980s and 1990s, building on the advocacy work of disabled people’s movements, and its foundational theoretical contribution was the distinction between the medical model and the social model of disability.

Definition 5.1 (Medical vs. Social Model of Disability). The medical model of disability locates disability in the individual body: a person is disabled because their body does not function according to a biological norm. The task of medicine is to cure or manage the condition — to bring the disabled body as close as possible to the norm. The social model of disability, developed by activists and scholars like Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, relocates disability in the social environment: disability is not the property of an individual body but the product of an environment designed for a particular range of bodies and capacities. A wheelchair user is disabled not by their inability to walk but by the existence of stairs; a blind person is disabled not by their lack of sight but by a visual-centric world of print text and visual signage.

Joseph Straus’s Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (2011) was the first book-length application of disability studies frameworks to musicology and music theory. Straus organized his inquiry around three domains: composers with disabilities, representations of disability in musical works, and disabled listening and concert access. In all three domains, he showed that disability — far from being a marginal or exceptional topic — illuminates central questions about musical creativity, musical structure, and musical culture.

5.2 Beethoven’s Deafness and Biographical Reading

The most familiar case of disability in music history is Beethoven’s deafness, which began to develop in his late twenties and was essentially complete by the early 1820s, during the composition of the Ninth Symphony and the late string quartets. The standard biographical account treats Beethoven’s deafness as a tragedy overcome by heroic artistic willpower: the composer who could no longer hear continued to create masterpieces through some combination of musical imagination and skeletal hearing that we cannot quite reconstruct. The narrative is one of individual triumph over adversity, and it has been used to inspire countless musicians and non-musicians alike.

Straus’s disability studies reading disrupts this narrative at several points. First, it questions the assumption that deafness is straightforwardly a tragedy — an assumption that many in the Deaf community vigorously contest. From a Deaf cultural perspective, deafness is not a deprivation but a difference: a different way of being in relation to sound and language, one that sustains its own rich culture, identity, and community. Beethoven’s deafness, on this reading, is not the dramatic flaw in an otherwise perfect composer but simply a difference that shaped his relationship to sound and composition in ways we can try to understand without imposing a narrative of loss.

Example 5.1 (Deafness in the Late Quartets). Several analysts have proposed that features of Beethoven's late style — the extreme dynamic contrasts, the unusual textural juxtapositions, the tendency toward extreme registers, the unusual repetitions and apparent non sequiturs — can be related to the composer's changed relationship to sound through progressive deafness. Straus, drawing on this analytical literature, suggests that rather than asking "how did Beethoven compose despite being deaf?" we might ask "how did deafness shape the distinctive aesthetic of the late style?" — a reframing that treats deafness as a creative condition rather than an obstacle. This does not mean that deafness caused particular compositional choices in a simple causal sense, but that the bodily experience of hearing loss may have been one of several factors shaping the late style's characteristic strangeness and its departure from Classical norms.

5.3 Ableism and Musical Analysis

The concept of ableism — the assumption that ability-normative bodies and minds are the standard against which all others are measured and found deficient — operates pervasively in musicological and analytical discourse. The category of “normal” hearing underwrites a vast apparatus of musical instruction, evaluation, and criticism: ear training assumes that students will develop a particular kind of tonal hearing; performance pedagogy assumes a particular kind of physical relationship to instruments; the concert hall as an architectural form assumes a particular kind of auditory attention and bodily stillness.

Straus identified a range of ways in which disability appears as a structural feature of musical narrative: the disabled body or mind as a site of stigma to be concealed; the performance of “passing” — of approximating normalcy — as a formal strategy; the narrative arc of disability from initial difference through social pressure toward normalization or cure; the moments of “coming out” in which difference is made explicit and either accepted or rejected. He applied this framework to musical works, arguing that certain compositional trajectories — the movement from dissonance to consonance, from harmonic instability to resolution, from metric irregularity to regular periodicity — can be read as disability narratives: stories of deviance, struggle, and normalization.

The blind musician as a cultural type has its own complex ideological history. Ray Charles, José Feliciano, and Stevie Wonder have all been subjected to a narrative in which blindness is simultaneously a source of authentic musical sensitivity (the blind musician “hears more,” “compensates” through sonic acuity) and a disability overcome by exceptional individual talent. This narrative reproduces ableist assumptions even in its apparent celebration: it treats blindness as a lack to be compensated for rather than a difference to be accepted, and it instrumentalizes disability as the ground of a particular kind of musical authenticity.

5.4 Access, Representation, and Music Therapy

The social model of disability demands attention not only to compositional history and musical analysis but to the accessibility of musical institutions in the present. The concert hall, as typically designed, is an able-bodied space: it assumes an audience that can enter through its doors (often without ramps or lifts), sit in its seats for extended periods, process its visual and auditory information in standard ways, and navigate its social conventions of attentive silence. Relaxed performances — in which audience members are permitted to make noise, move around, and respond more openly to the music — have emerged as one response to the exclusivity of the standard concert format, particularly for audiences with autism, dementia, or other conditions that make standard concert attendance difficult. Audio description, British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation of opera and song lyrics, and enhanced hearing-loop systems represent other interventions into the accessibility of musical performance.

Remark 5.1 (Music Therapy and Its Discontents). The discourse of music therapy — the clinical use of music to promote health, wellbeing, and therapeutic goals — occupies an ambiguous position within disability studies. On one hand, music therapy's practice of tailoring musical engagement to the specific needs and capacities of disabled clients represents a genuine departure from the able-normative assumptions of mainstream music culture. On the other hand, music therapy can reproduce medical-model assumptions: it frequently frames disability as a deficit to be managed through music, positions the therapist as the expert and the disabled person as the patient, and defines success in terms of approximation to normative functioning. Disability studies scholars have called for a more self-critical practice of music therapy that takes the social model seriously and attends to the agency and self-determination of disabled musicians and listeners.

Chapter 6: Marxism, Adorno, and the Culture Industry

6.1 Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Culture Industry Thesis

Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer, writing in Los Angeles exile during the Second World War, produced in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) one of the most influential and most contested analyses of mass culture in the twentieth century. Their central argument, formulated in the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” was that the industrialized production and distribution of cultural goods — radio, film, recorded music, illustrated magazines — constituted a new and particularly effective instrument of social domination.

Definition 6.1 (The Culture Industry). For Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry is the system by which cultural production is organized on industrial principles — standardized, mass-produced, and distributed for profit — in ways that systematically suppress the autonomy and critical capacity of the consuming subject. The culture industry differs from earlier forms of commercial entertainment not merely in scale but in kind: it achieves the integration of consumer consciousness into the existing social order by producing pseudo-individual goods — products that appear different and personally chosen but are in fact variations on standardized templates — that satisfy the desire for novelty while foreclosing genuine aesthetic experience.

Standardization and pseudo-individualization are the key mechanisms of the culture industry’s operation. Every popular song, Adorno argued, follows the same formal template: verse-chorus structure, predictable harmonic progressions, a “hook” that is immediately memorable and immediately exhausted by repetition. The apparent differences between songs — this one has a trumpet solo, that one has a guitar break; this singer has a gravelly voice, that one a sweet falsetto — are superficial variations on a standard form, designed to create the impression of novelty and personal choice while delivering the same product. The consumer who believes they are exercising individual taste by preferring one song to another is, on this account, participating in an illusion: the choices available to them have already been structured by the industry.

6.2 Adorno on Jazz and the Critique of His Critique

Adorno’s treatment of jazz is among the most infamous passages in the literature of music and cultural theory, and it has attracted sustained and largely justified criticism from jazz scholars and cultural theorists. In a series of essays from the 1930s to the 1960s, Adorno argued that jazz was not a form of genuine artistic resistance to the culture industry but rather its most effective instrument: its apparent spontaneity was illusory, its improvisation formulaic, its rhythmic vitality a controlled and commodified simulation of primitive energy that served the interests of social conformity rather than subversion.

Remark 6.1 (Problems with Adorno on Jazz). The problems with Adorno's analysis of jazz are multiple and serious. Most fundamentally, his knowledge of jazz was severely limited: he appears to have based his critique primarily on commercially produced dance band recordings and to have been largely unaware of bebop — the radical artistic movement in jazz that emerged in the 1940s in explicit opposition to commercial dance music. More deeply, his analysis reproduced the racial politics he should have been criticizing: his dismissal of jazz's rhythmic vitality as "primitive" and his implicit assumption that the standard of genuine artistic value was the European concert music tradition replicated Eurocentric hierarchies rather than subverting them. African-American musicians like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane were engaged in precisely the kind of autonomous, formally innovative, critically demanding artistic practice that Adorno claimed was impossible in the culture industry — and his framework had no resources for recognizing this.

6.3 Autonomous Art and Schoenberg’s Promise

For Adorno, the space of genuine artistic resistance to the culture industry was occupied by autonomous art: works that refuse the commodity form, that cannot be easily consumed, that demand from their audience a kind of concentrated, active engagement that the culture industry systematically trains people not to give. The composer who best embodied this possibility was Arnold Schoenberg, whose twelve-tone method — organizing pitch organization around a strictly ordered series of all twelve chromatic pitches, avoiding the tonal hierarchies of functional harmony — produced music of formidable difficulty and formal complexity that could not be hummed, could not be marketed as entertainment, and refused to provide the pleasures of recognition and familiarity that the culture industry trades in.

Adorno’s reading of Beethoven was also organized around this opposition between autonomy and commodity. The late Beethoven — the composer of the last string quartets and the Missa Solemnis — represented for Adorno a music that had become fully aware of its own formal conditions and refused any easy reconciliation with the social order: its characteristic fragmentariness, its refusal of ornament, its concentration on the skeletal essentials of form, were signs of a music that had withdrawn from the compromises of bourgeois musical culture into the austere space of formal truth.

6.4 Musicking, Attali, and Alternative Frameworks

Christopher Small’s Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (1998) proposed a radical reorientation of musical ontology with direct implications for any Marxist or political analysis of musical culture. Small argued that music is not primarily a set of objects — works, pieces, compositions — but an activity: musicking, the verb form he coined, encompasses performing, listening, composing, rehearsing, practicing, even cleaning the hall before a concert. By shifting from the noun to the verb, Small redirected attention from the product to the social process of music-making, and from the aesthetic object to the social relationships that musical activity enacts and explores.

Small’s concept of musicking allows for a considerably more democratic and inclusive understanding of musical value than Adorno’s hierarchy of autonomous art vs. culture industry product. If music is an activity rather than an object, then the question of its value is not “does this work meet the formal standards of autonomous art?” but “what social relationships does this musicking enact, and are those relationships ones we value?” A community sing, a school concert, a parish choir rehearsal, a garage band — all of these are forms of musicking whose value lies not in the aesthetic quality of their products but in the social bonds, the shared pleasure, and the collective meaning-making they enable.

Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1977) offered an ambitious, speculative account of the relationship between musical organization and social order across European history. Attali proposed that music does not merely reflect social arrangements but anticipates them: musical practice heralds political and economic transformations before they are visible in other social domains. He identified four historical regimes of music: sacrificing (the ritual use of music in pre-capitalist societies to channel violence), representing (the representation of social order in court and church music), repeating (the recording and mass reproduction of music as a form of commodity production), and composing (a hypothetical future regime in which individuals compose music for themselves rather than for exchange, embodying a post-market form of sociality).

Example 6.1 (Hall, Hegemony, and Popular Music). Stuart Hall's adaptation of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony — the process by which dominant social groups maintain their power not through direct coercion but through the production of cultural consent — provided a more flexible and less deterministic framework for analyzing popular music than Adorno's culture industry thesis. From a Gramscian perspective, popular music is a site of ongoing struggle between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces: it is neither straightforwardly the instrument of social control nor straightforwardly the expression of popular resistance. A song can be both commercially produced and genuinely expressive of subordinate group experience; a musical style can be both co-opted by the dominant culture and retain genuine oppositional force. John Fiske's Understanding Popular Culture (1989) extended this argument: audiences are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning, using popular texts to articulate their own social positions and assert their own pleasures against the disciplinary intentions of the dominant culture.

The debate between the Adornian and the Gramscian-Fiskean traditions in popular music studies has not been conclusively resolved, and indeed it may not be resolvable in the abstract: the question of whether a particular cultural form is primarily an instrument of domination or primarily a resource for resistance depends on the specific cultural form, the specific historical context, and the specific community of listeners and practitioners. What the debate has produced is a set of analytical tools — the concept of the culture industry, the concept of hegemony, the concept of active audience — that remain indispensable for anyone seeking to analyze the political dimensions of musical culture.

Chapter 7: Sound Studies

7.1 Sterne and the Audible Past

Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (2003) is the foundational text of sound studies — a field that, in the decade following its publication, emerged as one of the most dynamic areas of cultural inquiry in the humanities. Sterne’s book made a deceptively simple argument: the technologies of sound reproduction — the telephone, the phonograph, the radio — did not simply capture and transmit pre-existing sounds; they actively transformed the cultural techniques of listening, training ears to hear in new ways and producing new modes of acoustic experience and new forms of acoustic knowledge.

Definition 7.1 (Sound Studies). Sound studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines the cultural, social, historical, and political dimensions of sound and listening. It draws on cultural theory, media studies, the history of technology, musicology, acoustic ecology, and anthropology to analyze sound as a social phenomenon rather than a merely physical one. Sound studies is distinguished from traditional musicology by its refusal to privilege "music" as a special category of organized sound: it takes seriously the full spectrum of sonic experience, from music to noise, from speech to silence, from designed acoustic environments to the sounds of everyday life.

Sterne’s most polemical contribution to the field was his critique of what he called the audiovisual litany: the persistent cultural assumption that hearing is more immediate, more spiritual, more intimate, and more essentially connected to presence and interiority than vision. The audiovisual litany — the claim that “to hear is to be in the presence,” that sound is fleeting and immediate while images are fixed and mediated — underwrites a wide range of cultural theory, from phenomenological accounts of musical experience to theological claims about the voice as a vehicle of divine presence. Sterne argued that this hierarchy is not a phenomenological given but a cultural construction, one that became particularly powerful in the nineteenth century precisely because new technologies of sound reproduction were beginning to disrupt the apparent immediacy of acoustic experience.

7.2 Phonocentrism and Deconstruction

Sterne’s critique of the audiovisual litany resonates with Jacques Derrida’s analysis of phonocentrism in Western philosophical thought. In Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida argued that Western metaphysics had consistently privileged speech over writing — had treated the spoken word as the immediate presence of thought and meaning, and writing as a secondary, derivative, and potentially distorting representation. This privilege of the voice, Derrida showed, was not a neutral reflection of the greater intimacy of speech but an ideological construction that served the metaphysics of presence: the belief that meaning is always already fully present to consciousness and that its expression in spoken language captures this presence while its inscription in writing inevitably loses it.

Sterne did not simply apply Derrida to sound studies, but the resonances are clear: just as Derrida showed that the apparently immediate presence of the spoken voice is itself a construction, Sterne showed that the apparently immediate presence of acoustic experience is a cultural technique that required historical formation. To listen to music as an expression of presence — as an encounter with the intentions, emotions, and subjectivity of a performing human being — is not to have an unmediated experience of sound but to have been trained to listen in a particular way by particular cultural and technological formations.

7.3 Acoustic Ecology and the Soundscape

R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and acoustic theorist, developed the concept of the soundscape — the acoustic environment understood as a field of cultural meaning and ecological significance — through a series of books and projects in the 1970s. Schafer distinguished among keynote sounds (background sounds that define the acoustic character of an environment, analogous to the tonic note in music), soundmarks (sounds specific to a particular community, analogous to landmarks), and sound signals (sounds in the foreground of attention, demanding conscious response). He argued that the acoustic environment of industrial modernity was becoming a lo-fi soundscape — dominated by the continuous noise of machinery, traffic, and electronic sound reproduction — in which individual sounds were increasingly difficult to distinguish and the acoustic ecology of communities was being degraded.

Remark 7.1 (Critiques of Schafer's Acoustic Ecology). Schafer's acoustic ecology project has been criticized from several directions within sound studies. Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) demonstrated that the acoustic transformation of urban environments in the early twentieth century was more complex and more culturally varied than Schafer's dystopian narrative of lo-fi noise pollution suggested. More fundamentally, Schafer's acoustic ecology has been criticized for its nostalgia — its implicit privileging of pre-industrial "natural" soundscapes over the complex, hybrid soundscapes of modern cities — and for its tendency to impose a particular aesthetic judgment about noise and silence as universal ecological values rather than culturally specific preferences. The "hi-fi soundscape" that Schafer romanticizes — the acoustic world of the pre-industrial village — was no utopia for those who inhabited it, and its sounds of bells and watermills and birdsong were as socially organized and politically inflected as the urban noise that displaced them.

Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (2014) demonstrated the importance of extending sound studies beyond the Global North. Ochoa Gautier showed that listening and sound were central to the colonial and postcolonial politics of knowledge production in South America: the categorization of indigenous sounds as “noise” and the imposition of European sonic standards as the mark of civilization were instruments of colonial domination, and the formation of Colombian national culture involved intense struggles over sonic identity and acoustic legitimacy.

7.4 Sound, Race, and Sonic Violence

The most politically charged work in sound studies has attended to the relationship between sonic experience and racial power. Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005) examined the relationship between Black music, sound technology, and modernity, arguing that the phonograph and recorded sound were central to the construction of Afro-diasporic identity and cultural memory in the twentieth century. Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) proposed a theory of Black musical aesthetics centered on the concept of the break — the moment of rhythmic rupture, improvised departure, and embodied excess that he identified as the defining feature of the Black musical tradition from the blues and jazz to hip-hop.

Example 7.1 (Slavery's Sonic Regime). Both Weheliye and Moten, in different ways, attend to what Weheliye calls slavery's sonic regime: the use of sound as an instrument of racial domination during American slavery. The auction block, where enslaved people were made to demonstrate their physical fitness through movement and speech; the plantation system, where the sounds of overseers and bells regulated enslaved labor; the prohibition, in many Southern states, on enslaved people's access to drums (correctly perceived as instruments of communication and potential resistance) — all of these demonstrate that sonic control was an integral part of racial domination. The music that enslaved people nevertheless made — the spirituals, the field hollers, the work songs — was thus not simply an aesthetic activity but an act of sonic resistance, a claim of acoustic selfhood against a regime designed to reduce Black people to objects whose sounds were not their own.

Brandon LaBelle’s Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2010) extended the analysis of sound, space, and power to the full range of sonic environments, from the bedroom to the street, from the elevator to the concert hall. LaBelle argued that sound is always territorial — that sounds mark, claim, and contest spaces, and that the politics of sonic territory are inseparable from the politics of social space. The music that leaks from a neighbor’s apartment, the street preacher whose amplified voice claims public space, the personal audio device that creates a bubble of private sound in a crowded subway — all of these are instances of acoustic territory, of the use of sound to assert, contest, or negotiate spatial claims.

The boundary between music and noise is itself a cultural and political construction, not a description of acoustic fact. The sound that one community calls music is another’s noise; the sound that is welcomed in one social context is an intrusion in another. The history of noise ordinances, of complaints about “disturbing the peace,” and of conflicts over amplified music in public space is a history of competing claims to sonic territory in which race, class, and neighborhood politics are always implicated.

Chapter 8: Intersectionality and Current Directions

8.1 Intersectionality and the Limits of Single-Axis Analysis

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, developed in a pair of landmark legal theory articles in 1989 and 1991, proposed that the experiences of people who occupy multiple subordinated social positions cannot be understood by adding together the analyses of each axis of domination separately. A Black woman’s experience of discrimination is not simply the sum of racism and sexism; it is a qualitatively distinct experience that emerges from the specific intersection of racial and gender subordination and that is rendered invisible by analytical frameworks that consider race and gender separately.

Definition 8.1 (Intersectionality). Intersectionality is an analytical framework that examines how different systems of social power — race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, nationality, and others — interact to produce specific configurations of privilege and disadvantage. The framework insists that these systems are not parallel, additive, or independent but are mutually constitutive: the meaning of race is different for men and women, for rich and poor, for able-bodied and disabled people; the meaning of gender is different across racial, class, and sexual lines. Intersectional analysis attends to the specific experiences produced at the intersections of multiple systems of power, rather than generalizing from the experience of the most privileged members of any single subordinated group.

Applied to musicology, intersectionality reveals the limitations of single-axis critical approaches. A feminist musicology that centers the experiences of white women composers — their exclusion from the canon, their marginalization in academic music departments, the gendered critical vocabulary applied to their work — may fail to attend to the specifically racial dimensions of women of color musicians’ experiences. A race-critical musicology focused on the construction of Black music as a category may fail to analyze how gender and sexuality shape that construction — may reproduce, for example, the masculinist assumptions of the “authentic” blues tradition or the hip-hop mainstream. Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination — the framework she proposed in Black Feminist Thought (1990) for understanding how race, class, gender, and sexuality operate simultaneously through four domains of power (structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal) — provides a more comprehensive model for analyzing how musical institutions reproduce multiple hierarchies at the same time.

8.2 The Pipeline Problem in Music Academia

The concept of the pipeline — the sequence of educational stages through which one must pass to enter a profession — provides a useful framework for analyzing the demographic composition of music academia. In virtually every domain of professional classical music — composition, conducting, music theory, musicology, conservatory administration — the pipeline has been and in many cases remains overwhelmingly white, and substantially male in the most prestige-laden positions. The question of why this is so cannot be answered by any single-axis analysis.

The exclusions operate at multiple points: in early musical education, where access to private instrumental instruction is heavily conditioned by class; in conservatory admissions, where informal networks of recommendation and the audition process reproduce existing demographic patterns; in graduate school funding and mentorship, where the reproduction of academic culture through relationships between faculty and students disadvantages those who do not fit the normative profile; and in hiring, promotion, and programming decisions, where explicit bias, implicit bias, and the structural conservatism of musical institutions all play roles. An intersectional analysis attends to how these exclusions are differently experienced by women of color, by disabled musicians, by first-generation university students, by musicians from musical traditions outside the European art music mainstream — and insists that addressing the pipeline problem requires interventions at all of these points simultaneously.

Remark 8.1 (Whose Archives Are Preserved?). The question of whose music gets digitized and whose archives are preserved is not a neutral technical question but a political one. The music of white European male composers exists in extensively digitized form: scores, manuscripts, correspondence, and recordings are available through institutional repositories, research libraries, and commercial databases. The music of women composers, composers of color, and composers outside the Western art music tradition is far less systematically preserved and far less accessible in digital form. The archive of popular music is highly uneven: the music of commercially successful artists is extensively documented, while the music of marginal, underground, or local communities may exist only in deteriorating physical media or in the memories of aging musicians. Digital musicology, if it is to be genuinely comprehensive, must attend to these inequities in archival preservation and take active steps to correct them.

8.3 Music and the Black Lives Matter Movement

The Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin and intensified dramatically in 2020 following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, generated a remarkable body of musical response. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (2015) — released in the months between the Ferguson uprising and the movement’s explosive growth — stands as the most critically acclaimed musical response to the political crisis of anti-Black racism in contemporary America, and it has become a significant object of critical musicological attention.

Example 8.1 (To Pimp a Butterfly as Critical Musicological Object). To Pimp a Butterfly invites critical musicological analysis on multiple levels. Musically, it is a formally complex work that draws on jazz (featuring Thundercat and Kamasi Washington), funk, and spoken word, creating a musical language of deliberate eclecticism that enacts at the sonic level the album's thematic concern with Black cultural tradition and its contestation. Its lyrics engage directly with debates about Black masculinity, survivor's guilt, pan-African politics, and the psychology of success under conditions of systemic racism. Its position in the marketplace — a major-label release that simultaneously achieved enormous commercial success and made no concessions to the conventions of commercial hip-hop — raises precisely the questions about autonomy, commodity, and resistance that Adorno formulated, while providing an instance that thoroughly complicates his pessimistic conclusions. A full critical musicological reading of the album would need to bring together the race analysis of Chapter 3, the Marxist cultural theory of Chapter 6, and the intersectional framework of this chapter — attending simultaneously to its sonic construction of Black masculinity, its relationship to the culture industry, and its engagement with the intersecting structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality that produce contemporary Black American experience.

8.4 Streaming, Algorithms, and the Platform Economy

The transformation of music distribution by streaming platforms — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal — represents the most significant structural change in the music industry since the introduction of recorded sound. For critical musicologists, the streaming economy raises questions that cut across all of the theoretical frameworks surveyed in this course. The culture industry thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer finds new relevance in an economic model that concentrates distributional power in a handful of transnational platforms, compensates artists at rates so low as to be effectively non-existent for all but the most successful, and organizes listening through algorithmic recommendation systems whose cultural effects are only beginning to be understood.

Spotify’s algorithmic construction of genre and taste — the playlist as the primary mode of music discovery, the recommendation engine that learns from listening behavior and nudges users toward more of the same — raises the question of whether platform-mediated listening represents a new form of pseudo-individualization in Adorno’s sense: an apparent personalization that is in fact a standardization, training users to identify with a taste profile that the platform has constructed from aggregate data. The algorithmic playlist does not ask “what would you like to hear?” but rather “what do people like you typically hear next?” — a question whose answer encodes existing patterns of taste and genre that the algorithm perpetuates and amplifies.

At the same time, streaming has enabled forms of musical discovery and global circulation — of K-pop, Afrobeats, Latin trap, and a vast range of previously geographically restricted musics — that complicate any simple culture industry narrative. The question of whether streaming’s apparent globalization of musical taste represents genuine cultural exchange or a new form of world music consumption in Adorno and Horkheimer’s sense — the absorption of peripheral musical differences into a standardized global market — remains genuinely open.

8.5 Digital Musicology and the Politics of the Archive

The emergence of digital musicology — the application of computational methods to the analysis of large musical corpora, the digitization of musical archives, and the use of digital tools for music historical research — has opened new possibilities for the field while reproducing some of its existing inequities in new forms. Large-scale computational analysis of the musical canon — network analysis of compositional influence, corpus studies of harmonic syntax, machine learning approaches to style classification — can reveal patterns invisible to close reading of individual works. But these analyses are only as representative as the corpora they analyze, and corpora tend to be built from existing canonical repertoires.

Definition 8.2 (Open Access and Knowledge Justice). The movement toward open access publishing in musicology — making scholarly articles and books freely available online rather than behind paywalls accessible only to institutional subscribers — is not merely a technical question about publishing models but a question of knowledge justice. Critical musicology, which takes seriously the relationship between knowledge and power, has a particular obligation to make its insights available to musicians, activists, and communities who are not members of research universities. The irony of a decolonial musicology published exclusively in expensive journals accessible only to the tenured faculty of wealthy institutions is not lost on its critics, and the movement toward open access represents one institutional response to this tension.

8.6 The Future of Critical Musicology

Critical musicology, as it approaches the third decade of the twenty-first century, faces a set of challenges that are simultaneously intellectual, institutional, and political. Intellectually, the field has produced a rich and genuinely pluralistic set of theoretical frameworks — feminist, queer, postcolonial, disability, Marxist, sound studies, intersectional — each of which illuminates dimensions of musical experience and musical culture that single-method approaches cannot. The challenge is to develop forms of analysis that can bring these frameworks into productive dialogue without reducing any of them to a special case of the others.

Institutionally, critical musicology occupies an unstable position within music departments and schools of music that remain, in many cases, dominated by the values and priorities of the Western art music tradition: performance excellence, compositional innovation within recognized traditions, and the technical mastery of a specific instrumental or theoretical canon. The critical musicologist who asks fundamental questions about the ideology of these values may find themselves in productive tension with their departmental culture — or in unproductive conflict with colleagues who see the critical project as an attack on music rather than an expansion of what music study can mean.

Remark 8.2 (Decolonial Curricula and Anti-Racist Pedagogy). The project of decolonizing the music curriculum and developing anti-racist music pedagogy requires changes not only in repertoire but in the foundational assumptions of musical education. This means rethinking not only which musics are studied but how musical value is theorized, how musical analysis is conducted, and what kinds of musical knowledge are recognized as legitimate. It means developing pedagogical approaches that take seriously the musical knowledge that students bring from their own communities and traditions, rather than treating the Western art music tradition as the norm from which all other musics are deviations. It means attending to the racial and gender composition of the professoriate and the student body, and taking seriously the ways in which the culture of music academia — its mentorship networks, its evaluation criteria, its social norms — disadvantages those who do not fit its historical demographic profile. None of this is straightforward or uncontested; the debates about decolonizing the music curriculum have been heated and ongoing, and they show no signs of resolution.

Politically, the developments of the early 2020s — the COVID-19 pandemic’s devastation of the live music economy, the racial reckoning of 2020 and its effects on institutional culture, the accelerating climate crisis that threatens acoustic environments and the physical infrastructure of musical culture — have made the political stakes of music more visible and more urgent. The music of social movements, the music of mourning, the music of solidarity and resistance: these are not peripheral objects of musicological curiosity but central phenomena in a world where the relationship between sound and power is more immediately legible than it has been for decades.

The eight chapters of this course have traced the development of critical musicology from its emergence in the debates of the 1980s through its current engagement with the most pressing intellectual and political questions of the present. What they demonstrate, cumulatively, is that music is never merely sound: it is a social practice, a cultural form, an ideological instrument, a site of pleasure and resistance, a vehicle of identity and community, a commodity and a gift. To study music critically is to take all of these dimensions seriously simultaneously — to hold together the close reading of musical structure, the historical analysis of institutional context, the theoretical analysis of power and ideology, and the political commitment to a more just sonic world. This is the task, endlessly difficult and endlessly rewarding, of critical musicology.

The discipline’s future will be shaped by the next generation of scholars, many of whom bring to the study of music experiences and perspectives that were systematically excluded from academic musicology through most of its history. Their work — attending to musics that were never considered worthy of scholarly attention, developing analytical tools adequate to traditions that resist European-derived methods, forging intellectual alliances with communities of musicians and listeners outside the academy — will determine whether critical musicology remains the vital, contested, and politically engaged field it has become, or retreats into a new orthodoxy as comfortable and as limiting as the positivism it displaced.

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