Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T19:02:20.180Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

New Riffs on the Old Mind-Body Blues: “Black Rhythm,” “White Logic,” and Music Theory in the Twenty-First Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2015

TOM PERCHARD
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Contemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanity—constructed in earnest within European anthropologies and philosophies from the Enlightenment on—were reflected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of musical-cultural evolution, with complex and intellectualized art music forms always shown as transcending base and bodily rhythm, just as light skin supposedly transcended dark. The errors of old and now disreputable scholarly approaches have been given much attention. Yet scientifically oriented twenty-first-century studies of putatively Afro-diasporic and, especially, African American rhythmic practices seem often to stumble over similarly racialized fault lines, the relationship between “sensory” music, its “intelligent” comprehension, and its analysis still procedurally and politically fraught. Individual musical sympathies are undermined by methods and assumptions common to the field in which theorists operate. They operate, too, in North American and European university departments overwhelmingly populated by white scholars. And so this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives, and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 321 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agawu, Kofi. “The Invention of ‘African Rhythm.’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48/3 (1995): 380–95.Google Scholar
Alland, Alexander. Race in Mind: Race, IQ, and Other Racisms. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.Google Scholar
Alwakeel, Ramzy. “IDM as a ‘Minor’ Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by ‘Intelligent Dance Music.’” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1/1 (2009): 1–21. https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/dancecult/article/view/268.Google Scholar
Benadon, Fernando. “Time Warps in Early Jazz.” Music Theory Spectrum 31/1 (2009): 1–25.Google Scholar
Benadon, Fernando and Ted Gioia. “How Hooker Found His Boogie: A Rhythmic Analysis of a Classic Groove.” Popular Music 28/1 (2009): 19–32.Google Scholar
Bent, Ian with Drabkin, William. Analysis. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987.Google Scholar
Bispham, John C. “Rhythm in Music: What Is It? Who Has It? And Why?” Journal of Music Perception 24/2 (2006): 125–34.Google Scholar
Bjerke, Kristoffer Yddal. “Timbral Relationships and Microrhythmic Tension: Shaping the Groove Experience Through Sound.” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Danielsen, Anne, 85–101. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Bohlman, Philip. “Erasure: Displacing and Misplacing Race in Twentieth-Century Music Historiography.” In Western Music and Race, ed. Brown, Julie, 3–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Butterfield, Matthew W. “Race and Rhythm: The Social Component of the Swing Groove.” Jazz Perspectives 4/3 (2010): 301–35.Google Scholar
Cateforis, Theo. “Performing the Avant-Garde Groove: Devo and the Whiteness of the New Wave.” American Music 22/4 (2004): 564–88.Google Scholar
Christodoulou, Chris. “Renegade Hardware: Speed, Pleasure and Cultural Practice in Drum ’n’ Bass Music.” Ph.D. dissertation, London South Bank University, 2009.Google Scholar
Collier, James Lincoln. Jazz: The American Theme Song. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Conyers, James L. Jr., ed. African American Jazz and Rap: Social and Philosophical Examinations of Black Expressive Behavior. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2001.Google Scholar
Cook, Nicholas. The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Cross, Ian. “Music and Cognitive Evolution.” In Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Dunbar, Robin and Barrett, Louise, 649–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Danielsen, Anne. Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Danielsen, Anne. “Here, There and Everywhere: Three Accounts of Pulse in D’Angelo's ‘Left and Right.’” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Danielsen, Anne, 19–36. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Danielsen, Anne. “Introduction: Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Danielsen, Anne, 1–16. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Doane, Ashley “Woody.” “Rethinking Whiteness Studies.” In White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. , Ashley “Woody” and Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 3–18. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Dunsby, Jonathan and Arnold Whittall. Music Analysis in Theory and Practice. London: Faber, 1988.Google Scholar
Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.Google Scholar
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant's Anthropology.” Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Faull, Katherine M.. Bucknell Review 38/2 (1995): 200–39.Google Scholar
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. London: Blackwell, 1997.Google Scholar
Fink, Robert. “Goal-Directed Soul? Analyzing Rhythmic Teleology in African American Popular Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64/1 (2011): 179–238.Google Scholar
Floyd, Samuel A. Jr. “Black Music and Writing Black Music History: American Music and Narrative Strategies.” Black Music Research Journal 28/1 (2008): 111–21.Google Scholar
Floyd, Samuel A. Jr. and Radano, Ronald. “Interpreting the African-American Musical Past: A Dialogue.” Black Music Research Journal 29/1 (2009): 1–10.Google Scholar
Gioia, Ted. “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth.” Musical Quarterly 73/1 (1989): 130–43.Google Scholar
Grant, M. J.Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. “Genetics, Biosocial Groups and the Future of Identity.” Daedelus 135/4 (2006): 81–95.Google Scholar
Hodeir, André. “Deux temps à la recherche.” Musurgia 2/3 (1995): 35–42.Google Scholar
Holtmeier, Ludwig. “From ‘Musiktheorie’ to ‘Tonsatz’: National Socialism and German Music Theory After 1945.” Music Analysis 23/2–3 (2004): 245–66.Google Scholar
Hoyt, Peter A. “On the Primitives of Musical Theory: The Savage and Subconscious as Sources of Analytical Authority.” In Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Clark, Suzannah and Rehding, Alexander, 197–212. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Hyer, Brian. “Tonality.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Christensen, Thomas, 726–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Johnson, Julian. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Kajikawa, Loren. “‘My Name Is’: Signifying Whiteness, Rearticulating Race.” Journal of the Society for American Music 3/3 (2009): 341–63.Google Scholar
Keil, Charles. Urban Blues, 2nd ed.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Keil, Charles and Feld, Stephen. Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G. “A Sole Response.” American Quarterly 52/3 (2000): 533–45.Google Scholar
Kerman, Joseph. Musicology. London: Fontana, 1985.Google Scholar
Kolchin, Peter. “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America.” Journal of American History 89/1 (2002): 154–73.Google Scholar
Kramer, Lawrence. “Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music.” Black Music Research Journal 16/1 (1996): 53–70.Google Scholar
Latartara, John. “Laptop Composition at the Turn of the Millennium: Repetition and Noise in the Music of Oval, Merzbow, and Kid606.” Twentieth Century Music 7/1 (2010): 95–115.Google Scholar
Lynn, Richard. Race Differences in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Analysis. Augusta, GA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2006.Google Scholar
McClary, Susan and Walser, Robert. “Theorizing the Body in African-American Music.” Black Music Research Journal 14/1 (1994): 75–84.Google Scholar
Middleton, Richard. Studying Popular Music. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Montag, Warren. “The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and the Enlightenment.” In Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Hill, Mike, 281–93. New York: New York University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Munro, Martin. Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Nakayama, Thomas K. and Martin, Judith N., eds. Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999.Google Scholar
Perchard, Tom. “Tradition, Modernity and the Supernatural Swing: Re-Reading ‘Primitivism’ in Hugues Panassié's Writing on Jazz.” Popular Music 30/1 (2011): 25–45.Google Scholar
Pressing, Jeff. “Black Atlantic Rhythm: Its Computational and Transcultural Foundations.” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19/3 (2002): 285–310.Google Scholar
Quinn, Eithne. Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang: The Culture and Commerce of Gangsta Rap. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Radano, Ronald. Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Guthrie. “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade.” Musical Quarterly 85/1 (2001): 1–52.Google Scholar
Ramsey, Guthrie. “Secrets, Lies and Transcriptions: Revisions on Race, Black Music and Culture.” In Western Music and Race, ed. Brown, Julie, 24–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Simon. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. London: Routledge, 1998.Google Scholar
Riley, Matthew. “Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the ‘Aesthetic Force’ of Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127/1 (2002): 1–22.Google Scholar
Sandke, Randall. Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Schenker, Heinrich. Free Composition, trans. Oster, Ernst. 1935. Reprint, New York: Longman, 1979.Google Scholar
Schenker, Heinrich. The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook, ed. Drabkin, William, trans. Bent, Ian, Clayton, Alfred, and Puffet, Derrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Scott, Derek B. “In Search of Genetically Modified Music: Race and Musical Style in the Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 3/1 (2006): 3–23.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Peter. “Beats and the Brat.” The Wire 212 (October 2001): 36–43.Google Scholar
Solie, Ruth A. “The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis.” 19th-Century Music 4/2 (1980): 147–56.Google Scholar
Sudhalter, Richard. Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Tomlinson, Gary. “Musicology, Anthropology, History.” In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Clayton, Martin, Herbert, Trevor, and Middleton, Richard, 31–44. London: Routledge, 2003.Google Scholar
Wander, Philip C., Martin, Judith N., and Nakayama, Thomas K.. “Whiteness and Beyond: Sociohistorical Foundations of Whiteness and Contemporary Challenges.” In Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. Nakayama, Thomas K. and Martin, Judith N., 13–26. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1999.Google Scholar
Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations. London: UCL Press, 1998.Google Scholar
White, John. Intelligence, Destiny and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing. London: Routledge, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wimsatt, William Upski. Bomb the Suburbs. 2nd ed.New York: Soft Skull Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Yancy, George, ed. White on White/Black on Black. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.Google Scholar
Zbikowski, Lawrence M. “Modelling the Groove: Conceptual Structure and Popular Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129/2 (2004): 272–97.Google Scholar
Zeiner-Henriksen, Hans T. “Moved by the Groove: Bass Drum Sounds and Body Movements in Electronic Dance Music.” In Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ed. Danielsen, Anne, 121–40. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Zuberi, Tukufu and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds. White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.Google Scholar