Princes and Paupers

Chapter 2 examines a famous experiment conducted in the name of musical love and loss: journalist Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer-winning Washington Post article, which narrated the 2007 undercover busking effort by famed violinist Joshua Bell. Playing beautiful classical repertoire, the disguised Bell attracted few eager listeners. Many readers declared their love of this story, lamenting its proof of how beauty gets drowned out in our busy lives. Other responses to Weingarten fell into traps of intellectual elitism, as people rushed to proclaim that “obviously” this article was hokum and that no reader would be gullible enough to buy what Weingarten was selling. A trio of themes emerges from my critiques of aesthetic and academic exceptionalism: how we mismeasure beauty and its scarcity, how we productively or harmfully imbue musicianship with humanizing values, and why lovable dreams of musical universalism (we are all musical, we are all musicians) may elude or even impede agendas of social justice.

Prelude

Loving music till it hurts: it’s something many of us are likely familiar with. First, we know what it’s like to love certain music so much, it hurts—that deep and aching feeling of being moved to tears, chills, and supreme wonder. Second, we know what it’s like to love such music until we believe the music itself is capable of feeling hurt. (Can music experience pain? Not literally. Yet think of how we anthropomorphize music, not least when we believe it has been somehow mistreated: a singer butchered the noble “Star-Spangled Banner,” a pianist mangled the delicate Mozart sonata.) Lastly, we might love music so much, we end up hurting other people. This book’s Prelude outlines how people’s love of music can spark behaviors, attitudes, and discourses that demonstrate a fierce protectiveness of music, sometimes to the detriment of fellow human beings. A central question here concerns whether people can find ways to love music without intentionally or unintentionally weaponizing this love—that is, without allowing it to serve oppressive, discriminatory, and violent purposes.

Postlude

A brief Postlude critiques societies’ common narratives around trauma as a source of beauty, musical and otherwise. It asks whether tropes of “tortured artists” and “no pain no gain” foreclose imaginations of realities in which the beautiful can—or should—exist without the romantic mandates of incipient terror.

Jordan Russell Davis

Chapter 6 closes the book with an extended investigation into how musical judgments can kill—how someone can be killed while listening to music he loves, and for refusing to turn it down when asked. In 2012, a forty-seven-year-old white man named Michael Dunn heard loud rap music coming from a nearby red car containing four black youths. He approached. Words were exchanged. A couple of minutes later, Dunn fired ten bullets at the car and killed one of its passengers, seventeen-year-old high school student Jordan Davis. Dunn claimed Davis had threatened him with a shotgun. No such gun was ever found. During the murder trial, Dunn’s lawyer, Cory Strolla, leveraged racist stereotypes of rap to paint dehumanizing (uncivilized, savage, criminal) and superhumanizing (formidable, fearsome, brawny) portraits of these youths. By contrast, Strolla depicted Dunn as someone who himself loved music, including “any type of hip-hop,” the stuff “that the kids listen to.” The chapter taps into various materials that were either purposely excluded from or inadvertently overlooked by media coverage: Michael Dunn’s jailhouse letters and phone calls, transcriptions of courtroom sidebars, pretrial documents, evidence technicians’ reports, and 911 records.

Feeling Overcome

Chapter 4 continues to chase down myths of meritocracy and the musical mystique across the stages of reality television competitions, which often feature disabled auditionees and their moving tales of overcoming adversity. Musical abilities in general and singing talents in particular are shown to normalize and humanize disabled contestants while once again silencing vital conversations about the exploitation, stigmatization, and corporate politics at work in these seductive narratives. One wrinkle is that critiques of “inspiration porn” are neither easy nor obvious: chronicles of overcoming can emotionally overcome consumers; heartwarming tales about disability can seemingly disable a beholder’s emotional, intellectual, and rhetorical faculties. As we either resist or succumb to the tearfulness induced by lovable stories and gorgeous songs, we must chart tricky routes through the heady skepticism of Scylla and the naive waterworks of Charybdis.

Interlude

The Interlude observes how various marginalized members (disabled people, queer people, people of color) of the American Musicological Society (AMS) entered the musicological field out of love for its scholarly and collegial possibilities, but how this love has not always been repaid—at times leading to the (usually quiet) departure of these members.

The Worst You’ve Ever Sounded

Chapter 5 focuses on the modern epidemic of public shaming. In 2014, someone leaked the raw, out-of-tune vocals of pop star Britney Spears attempting a studio take of her song “Alien.” Shame storms promptly followed. By connecting voice shaming to concomitant practices of sex shaming and slut shaming, the chapter asks what we think we gain when we judge, police, and dehumanize musicians at their worst moments. Do people shame musicians out of a putative love for music? Or is music simply an excuse, or an accomplice? Given the deluge of leakable data today—think of Ashley Madison, Panama Papers, congressional dossiers, revenge porn—provocative analogies materialize between our myths of secure networks (a technical impossibility) and our idealizations of pitch-perfect (infallible, unassailable) lyric voices. The chapter asks whether Spears’s naked voice can be heard not as shameworthy detritus best left on the cutting room floor, but rather as an object of clickbait that always already implicates our own aural vulnerability and consumer complicity.

Moral Masquerades

Chapter 3 drops in on a variety of “blind” auditions, commonly upheld as a gold standard in appraisals of musical excellence. Using screens and anonymizing apparatus, judges evaluate auditionees on sound alone, thereby doing right by the music they love. But a hidden cost of such auditions, whether for the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the reality show The Voice, is the wholesale severing of musicianship from human identity at large. With auditionees out of sight, the conceits of impartiality and meritocracy enable all parties to avoid talking about issues of discrimination altogether—that is, why anonymity is desirable or necessary to begin with. A short case study ventures outside the United States to consider the illustrious, nearly all-white and all-male Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Tellingly, however, criticisms of this orchestra have come overwhelmingly from the United States, with music lovers exporting American brands of feminism and social justice to protest the ensemble’s discriminatory hiring practices.

Misjudgments of Humanity

Chapter 1 asks how people’s love of music can enable myths of music as an instrument of humanization and civilization. Although it sounds obvious that loving masterpieces doesn’t make someone a good person (think of the Beethoven-loving Nazis), the chapter emphasizes that this presumption of obviousness can itself pose problems. How immune are we really to the seductive myths of music-as-morality? Even if we claim immunity out loud, how might our verbal quandaries and silences about music loving nevertheless speak to our deep-seated vulnerabilities?