..., producing an ecology of music and sound that reaffirms the term and, along with it, a multicultural account of diversity that takes the Western notion of culture as a viable concept for all peoples. This essay, rather, seeks to acknowledge a historical lineage of ethnomusicology and its relation...

...Ronald Radano While historians, musicologists, and cultural critics have long acknowledged the widespread and enduring appeal of US black music, few have grappled with the problem of its enormous cultural and aesthetic value. This essay proposes a material understanding of black musical value...

...Kevin Thomas Miles Haunting Music in The Souls of Black Folk Kevin Thomas Miles Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life...

...Richard Randall The materialization of music by means of notation and recording has had a number of consequences. On the one hand, it facilitates the transmission of music across space and time. On the other hand, formats have allowed music to become an excludable and rivalrous good. Formats embody...

...Gavin Steingo; Jairo Moreno Questions of value might seem beyond the pale in cases of sound and music. Both are objects of immense accumulation, appreciation, exploration, and investment—not just for the human species but also among other species, and indeed the world. Sound simply is, its...

...Amy Cimini; Jairo Moreno Music, sound, and aurality appear to be valuable for their inexhaustibility. With the notion of fiduciary aurality, we assess how this inexhaustibility is both mobilized and attenuated when music and sound are presumed to work on behalf of politics. In the early 1990s...

...Bill Dietz; Gavin Steingo In this essay, we present a reading of two dominant (often, though not always, opposed) modes of understanding music's value: first, a “negative posit” associated most closely with Theodor Adorno that valorizes negation and social uselessness and, second, an “affirmative...

...Peter Szendy Taking a close reading of the Marx Brothers' film The Big Store (1941) as its thread, this article explores the possibility of extending the concept of fetishism to the very performance of music, that is, to the bodily gestures and keyboardistic fingerings executed by Chico and Harpo...

...Roy Kay Abstract Prince was an artist who challenged many conventional notions of race, sexuality, and music. His music, characterized as the Minneapolis Sound, is a continuation and extension of America's indigenous music, the blues. This article is an explanation of the designation “Minneapolis...

... of music) offers an alternative view of the ontology of literature, without falling back into the long-frustrated attempts to “define literature.” Many (if not all) of the texts that we call “literary” provide us with exactly this impression of “being wrapped” into the material world—a material world...

... be achieved through the liberation of the body from revisionist histories that downplay the era's stunning political achievements. The enormous success sixties' activists had in mobilizing millions (“people power”) resulted from the coupling of theory and action through music, art, ritual, and theater...

... national anthem and have been sung by some of the most influential Arab stars, written on protest banners, and shouted by students in the face of French and English occupiers and their own governments. The couplet even entered the folklore of global protest music and poetry, and was adopted...

... into a professorship of music at a small midwestern college and, despite his fears, poor personal relationships, and morbid obsession with lurid exhibits (reports and pictures) for his attic “Inhumanity Museum,” ends up escaping discovery, the loss of his job, and public censure. In the biggest irony of all, perhaps...

... Boever ultimately ties such a theory to the unexceptional politics of democratic anarchy that Gourgouris has developed elsewhere. In conclusion, De Boever considers the music Gourgouris has released as “Count G” within this aesthetico-political frame. It's worth marking the dialectic at work in some...

...Christopher Connery Contemporary Chinese rock musician Xu Duo discusses his evolution as an artist and the genesis of his commitment to socially engaged, worker-oriented art and music. He discusses his role in the New Worker Art Troupe, including activities in and around the Migrant Workers Home...

... © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 Contributors Amy Cimini is currently assistant professor of music at UC San Diego. Her research engages twentieth-­century philosophy and political thought, with an emphasis on theories of the body and the ethics of experimental practice. She has...

... said and thought. The difficulty appears when you squeeze such texts for meaning. Original texts, in the world of music, are recordings. The history of jazz is defined by instruments and voices once alive with improbable sor- row and cheer, lost except for the mercy recording lends them. Davis...

... intimacy with Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, given multiple (sometimes strange) discursive musical variations. The demonic eccentric within the group’s relentless musical urge toward catastrophe is the displaced Opus 133, the maniacal and provocative Grosse Fugue. Its history of displace...

... The invention of technological sound recording in the form of the phonograph at the end of the nineteenth century offered the ability to split sounds from the sources that produced them, thus generating a ‘‘post- technological’’ orality and musicality in twentieth-century black culture. Since the space...