Interstitial Listenings II: Blurring the Hold
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Published:January 2025
Swiss composer and clarinetist Jérémie Jolo’s pieces Perspectives and Blurred Colors and RED, 2018 aid in elaborating the kind of shift in listening and registering necessary to hear Black Swiss lives. W. E. B. Du Bois encountered a similar question over one hundred years ago with his study The Philadelphia Negro. His shift in listening can be heard as what he later theorized in an unpublished essay, “Sociology Hesitant.” Both Du Bois and Jolo ask people to listen anew to the world and to ask questions about what we might be erasing in our listening. Lastly, they propose new ways of listening that require a continual musical practice of re-learning to listen to yet unheard/unknown sounds. Rapper Nativ is another example of this practice and brings us to asking how we might exceed the borders enforced by an antiblack world.
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