Curricular Reform and a Culture of Listening: Lessons from the Rosedale Freedom Project

I was formally introduced to antiracist pedagogy in the spring of 2016, several months before I traveled for the first time to the Rosedale Freedom Project (RFP) in Rosedale, Mississippi, to teach a course on music and politics to high school students. Oft romanticized as the place where blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, Rosedale is a small town in the Delta region. The majority of its population is Black, and consistently, more than half of this population has lived below the poverty line. The RFP seeks to help send its students, the majority of whom are Black and profoundly underserved by the state of Mississippi, to and through college. In preparation for the summer (and at the request of the director of the RFP), I read a number of foundational texts on antiracism and critical pedagogy including Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), and Beverly Daniel Tatum's “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: And Other Conversations About Race (1997). As a white woman with no prior experience in Mississippi, I also read Nan Elizabeth Woodruff's history of the Delta region, American Congo: The African American Struggle in the Delta (2003) and Jesmyn Ward's novel Where the Line Bleeds (2008), among other texts, and reflected on how to design a course that would further the RFP's mission of “supporting the Mississippi Delta's young leaders in the development of critical consciousness and the practice of justice.”

Conclusion

The Conclusion draws on the empirical findings of each chapter in order to theorize—reflect on—our way “out” of these case studies. It follows on from the conceptual and methodological themes laid out in Chapter 1, challenges presented to scholarship across the disciplinary spectrum that looks to locate and track where, and how, “politics” (of race, class, gender, and religion) are now being rendered as and through music. Chapter 7 recapitulates the main themes from each chapter as references to audio clips, suggested listening, in order to underscore the findings of this study: how music-and-politics and, or music-as-politics sound within, and between sociocultural and political economic settings. Getting closer to how these practices and sound archives work means taking into account creative practices and performance cultures not only of music making but also of music taking. This final chapter can also function as an introduction for the book as the flipside of Chapter 1.

Introduction

This chapter presents the disciplinary debates and terms of reference informing this exploration of music making in which sampling practices play a fundamental role. It maps out the theoretical and methodological terrain that informs the “close listening” approach to analyzing these works in light of a burgeoning interest from across the spectrum of academic research and music journalism in the interrelationship between music and politics—however these two domains may be defined. Developing earlier work addressing debates about when, and how music and politics may mutually inform one another, this chapter presents the socio-musicological and interdisciplinary approach to examining how this relationship “sounds” in five case studies. The objective is to provide a more refined conceptual lexicon and analytical framework so that reader-listeners can listen to, and so “hear” the respective ‘musicking politics” at stake in each case, and do so in ways that go beyond focusing on lyrical content alone or requiring an advanced level of musical knowledge. This opening chapter and the conclusion (Chapter 7) work together in either direction.

Taming rock music in communist states: Politicisation of Western popular culture in East Europe and mainland China

A comparison of the former Eastern Bloc and China’s ways of dealing with the social implications of rock music as an alien cultural import from the West reveals significant analogies. The paper traces the process of politicisation of rock music and compares the two different cultural spaces by mapping each space’s state ideology, aesthetic traditions and identities, and discriminative political and economic tools used to marginalise rock. Here the term politicisation refers mainly to the polarisation between the communist regimes’ restrictive policies, and the attempts of the rock scenes to sustain their discriminating characteristics and relationship to protest. While in European communist states rock played a relevant subversive role, conversely, in China any ‘rocking’ of the state has largely been averted. The Chinese rock scene as an off-mainstream urban subculture has received less popular support than its counterpart in Europe and has also proved less politically significant. This comparative case study discusses the relationship between popular music and politics by tracing analogies and differences between the former Czechoslovakia, where the ideologisation and politicisation of rock reached the highest point in the Eastern Bloc, and contemporary China.

Music, Politics, and History: An Introduction

Music has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by evaluating different approaches that historians have taken to music, summarizes the important shifts in method that have recently taken place, and advocates for a performance-centered, contextualized framework that is attentive to the distinctive features of music as a medium. The second half examines avenues for future research into the historical connections between music and politics, focusing on four thematic areas—the body, emotions, space, and memory—and closes with some overarching reflections on music's use as a tool of power, as well as a challenge to it. Although for reasons of cohesion, this short article focuses primarily on scholarship on Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its discussion of theory and methods is intended to be applicable to the study of music and political culture across a broad range of periods and geographies.

“Loud and Open Speaking in ‘the People's’ Mighty Name”: Eliza Cook, Music and Politics

In 1849, the working-class poet Eliza Cook (1818–89) expanded her international profile by venturing into weekly periodical publication with Eliza Cook's Journal. Not only was this the first British journal named after a female editor but it also placed an unusual emphasis on music—unusual not least because few women in that epoch were given the opportunity to participate in the broader critical discourses on music. Cook's poetry was already widely disseminated through various musical settings by composers from William Balfe to Henry Russell; in her new journal, music further emerged as central to her philosophy of liberation for all. Placing street musicians alongside opera and salon concerts in an exhibition of remarkably eclectic taste, Cook saw the propensity for music making in all layers of society. She regarded musical culture as a soundscape of experience, emotion, and agency to which she, and all those from the laboring classes, not only had a right to access, engage in, and share but was part of their own innate being. Music symbolized imagination, freedom from the mundane, and limitless human potential. Efforts to secure music for “the people” were thus indissolubly linked to broader political rights for suffrage and equality.

Music to Some Consequence: Reaction, Reform, Race

A naval chaplain in the 1790s, a radical arrested after Peterloo, and a smash hit of blackface minstrelsy: these three disparate historical actors all provide exemplary cases of music in action, playing upon the political passions of the British people. Thinking across the three examples, this article reflects upon the aims of the forum Music and Politics in Britain, c.1780–1850, as well as advancing its own autonomous argument. Alexander Duncan was drummed out of the navy for publishing a pamphlet advocating the use of martial music in action; inspired by the French, Duncan was effectively arguing for a democratization of Britain's servicemen by playing upon their passions. The potential for subversion inherent in this approach was borne out by the career of Samuel Bamford, a Lancashire weaver; music was central to Bamford's activism, and I chart the functional ends to which he deployed music around 1819. In a third instance, with the 1840s hit “Buffalo Gals,” music led to public disorder. The song, due in large part to its musical qualities, enabled forms of licentious behavior among white males that mobilized latent forms of gendered as well as racial prejudice, so that its performance came to excuse forms of sexual harassment.