This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually and inter-personally, the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for (...) a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes. (shrink)

(2010). Betwixt and Between: Working Through the Aesthetic in Philosophy of Education: George F. Kneller Lecture, Conference of the American Educational Studies Association Savannah, Georgia, October 30, 2008. Educational Studies: Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 291-316.

ABSTRACTI defend a non-reductionist view of music, according to which music should be understood in terms of musical beauty. I suggest that general theories of music are legitimate, and I discuss sublimity and argue that it is a species of beauty. Musical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties of that are realized in sounds. Sometimes, when we are fortunate, this experience generates pleasure in musical beauty. As Hanslick rightly insisted, there is no way to begin to understand what music (...) is, or to understand its value and why we value it, without putting musical beauty in the foreground and celebrating our experience of it. This positive position has negative consequences. Musical appreciation does not require pathologies of emotion, spurious political narratives, intimations of religious profundity and so on. The value is in the sounds. It is an immanent value, not a transcendent one. It is a this-worldly value, not an other-worldly delusion, or something self-indulgently in us. Musical beauty is there in the sounds, in “tones and their artistic combination,” as Hanslick maintained. (shrink)

In 2018, the Art Gallery of Ontario retitled a painting by Emily Carr which contained an offensive word. Controversy ensued, with some arguing that unsanctioned changes to a work’s title infringe upon artists’ moral and free speech rights. Others argued that such a change serves to whitewash legacies of racism and cultural genocide. In this paper, I show that these concerns are unfounded. The first concern is not supported by law or the history of our titling practices; and the second (...) concern misses the mark by ignoring the gallery’s substantial efforts to avoid just such an outcome. Picking up on a suggestion from Loretta Todd, I argue that we can use Aboriginal Title as a model for thinking about the harms perpetuated by cultural appropriation, and the practices we should adopt to mitigate them. (shrink)

The ‘return to beauty’ raises a number of questions for feminism. This paper begins by suggesting that there is no real reason for a feminist distrust either of beauty or of the discourses of beauty. The more difficult question is how to comprehend the bases of aesthetic judgement more generally, given feminist and other critiques of aesthetics and art criticism. The paper proposes looking at the cognate ‘value’ fields of ethics and political philosophy, in order to develop an approach to (...) aesthetics that recognizes aesthetic criteria as grounded in community. It has been argued that uncertainty is the necessary basis for morality and for political judgement after the demise of ideologies of universalism. For the same reasons, an ‘aesthetics of uncertainty’ can be developed which refuses both the new universalism of the ‘return to beauty’ and the temptation to abandon principled criteria of judgement. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 1, Page 74-93, February 2022. This study seeks to investigate aspects of the relationship between the core academic activities of teaching and research in higher education, through a theoretically enriched discussion of the design of an innovative popular music module on Adele’s 25 album and its delivery to first-year undergraduates on a general-purpose music degree during the academic years 2015–21. Drawing on autoethnographic approaches, it contemplates the challenges associated with the execution (...) of a module on genuinely contemporary topics, outlining the case for the importance of ensuring that university curricula remain up-to-the-minute as well as exploring strategies by which to realise this aspiration in the absence of a body of academic literature that might ordinarily have provided strong foundations for the content of such teaching. These lines of inquiry lead to consideration of broader questions concerning the evolving relationship between teaching and research in light of the substantial changes that have taken place within the UK higher education sector in recent years, as well as the possibilities for teaching-led research, developed exclusively for and in the academic classroom, as an alternative to the more traditional research-led teaching. (shrink)

As part of a series of Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, this paper focusses upon a short stretch of a final concert performance of the Saint-Saens Septet by a set of amateur musicians in which timing errors occur but in response to which various manoeuvres successfully restore synchrony. I set out to demonstrate that these afford a strategic access for ethnomethodologists to sets of musicians' practices whereby musical synchrony is ongoingly accomplished. The central curiosity of this study is the set of (...) distinctive practices whereby a musical text set out in a spatial, linear sequence of markings is realized in a collective performance that unfolds not only in precise time values but also in synchrony.This paper analyzes three errors in a short passage and the ways in which they are corrected either by the errant musician himself or by the other musician in response. In these cases, the restoration of synchrony and the routine performance of the piece thereafter are accomplished successfully in the sense that those listening to the tape of it generally fail to notice any problem! This contrasts to my detection of problems during both my participation in the performance and repeated listening of the resulting audio-tape, I argue that it is this systematic difference in possible hearings that musicians are oriented to when attempting to fake it. Thus, the essential interest is in members' methods for maintaining as well as restoring synchrony. (shrink)

This paper argues that, contrary to what many musicologists and classical musicians have maintained, music can, and should, be analysed as discourse. It then surveys a number of approaches to the critical analysis of musical discourse and applies these approaches to a range of examples, including sonatas, advertising jingles and news signature tunes.

ABSTRACTIneffability of musical meaning is a frequent theme in music philosophy. However, talk about musical meaning persists and seems to be not only inherently enjoyable and socially acceptable, but also functionally useful. Relying on a phenomenological account of musical meaning combined with a naturalist explanatory attitude, we argue for a novel explanation of how ineffability is a feature of musical meaning and experience and we show why it cannot be remedied by perfecting language or musico-philosophical study.Musical meaning is seen as (...) an experiential phenomenon that consists of layers, some recent, others archaic. As such, musical meaning is strongly characterized by asubjectivity. It is in-between, in a state where the division of subject and object is not yet valid or valid anymore. A naturalistic interplay of experiential layers in music brings about a non-reified dynamics driving for expressions, interpretations, engenderings of subjects and objects or even for political action. Generally speaking, the in-betweenness of musical meaning can never be universally reified or symbolic nor can it ever be “subjective,” “mine” or present “at the origin.”In this view, ineffability has two primary reasons. First, the criteria offered for defining musical meaning are often too strict, resulting in untenable pretensions of universality. Second, the processual and relational nature of the in-between keeps meaning in flux; any snapshot creates a new situation and new meanings. (shrink)

The treatment of eye brightness in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin is read to reveal a centuries-old Western eye code of love. This eye code is then used as a test of interaction theories essayed by Mead and by Goffman and of subjectivities left faceless by Foucault, Mulvey, Sartre and Lacan. The implications of Tolstoy's eye code are followed through to the conclusion that a woman in love (such as Anna Karenin) is a Nazi in the image of Hitler.

In this article, I consider whether a suitably stripped-down version of Kant's aesthetic theory could nevertheless provide philosophical foundations for musical formalism. I begin by distinguishing between formalism as a view about the nature of music and formalism as an approach to music criticism, arguing that Kant's aesthetics only rules out the former. Then, using an example from the work of musicologist and composer Edward T. Cone, I isolate the characteristics of formalist music criticism. With this characterization in mind, I (...) conclude by showing that even if Kant's aesthetic theory is reduced to its most fundamental claims, the logic of formalist music criticism precludes its practice within even a kantian perspective. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPopular music life is permeated by a quantitative form of male dominance, and has been for several decades. Based on a recent study this article engages with the reproduction of said male dominance by attempting to understand boys’ approaches to popular music and musicians. In particular, by making use of an interdisciplinary explanatory feminist theory the article seeks to show that interacting mechanisms at different levels make the adoption of a so-called ‘identificatory’ approach attainable for boys. The potential effect of (...) their adoption of this approach is that male dominance within popular music life is reproduced. In addition to this, however, a more general aim of this article is to illustrate the ways in which critical realism can inform empirical gender research, especially in terms of the postulation of explanatory mechanisms. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between politics and music; in particular it asks how music might be incorporated into accounts of political thought and action. Despite the fact that political science has tended to neglect the place of music in politics, there are a number of writers, such as Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, who have taken a different course. For them, music is intimately linked, via its aesthetics, to ethical judgements and to social order. The article develops these latter claims and connects (...) them to work of a similar kind in music studies to propose a framework which helps to make sense of, and give due weight to, the place of music – as organised sound – in political thought and action. Music, it is argued, should not be viewed just as a footnote to, or appendage of, political thought and action, but rather as an integral feature of them. (shrink)

I distinguish between the nineteenth- to twentieth-century (modernist) tendency to rehabilitate (white) femininity from the abject popular, and the twentieth- to twenty-first-century (postmodernist) tendency to rehabilitate the popular from abject white femininity. Careful attention to the role of nineteenth-century racial politics in Nietzsche's Gay Science shows that his work uses racial nonwhiteness to counter the supposedly deleterious effects of (white) femininity (passivity, conformity, and so on). This move—using racial nonwhiteness to rescue pop culture from white femininity—is a common twentieth- and (...) twenty-first-century practice. I use Nietzsche to track shifts from classical to neo-liberal methods of appropriating “difference.” Hipness is one form of this neoliberal approach to difference, and it is exemplified by the approach to race, gender, and pop culture in Vincente Minnelli's film The Band Wagon. I expand upon Robert Gooding-Williams's reading of this film, and argue that mid-century white hipness dissociates the popular from femininity and whiteness, and values the popular when performed by white men “acting black.” Hipness instrumentalizes femininity and racial nonwhiteness so that any benefits that might come from them accrue only to white men, and not to the female and male artists of color whose works are appropriated. (shrink)

Gender, race, and sexuality are not just identities; they are also systems of social organization – i.e., systems of privilege and oppression. This article addresses two main ways privilege and oppression (e.g., racism, misogyny, heteronormativity) are relevant topics in and for philosophical aesthetics: (i) the role of the aesthetic in privilege and oppression, and (ii) the role of philosophical aesthetics, as a discipline and a body of texts, in constructing and naturalizing relations of privilege and oppression (i.e., white heteropatriarchy). The (...) first part addresses how systems of privilege and oppression use the aesthetic. I will discuss various ways race, gender, and sexuality, as both embodied identities and broader social institutions, work with and through “the aesthetic”. The second part addresses racism and (hetero) sexism in the discipline of aesthetics. Both in its history and its present practice aesthetics’apparent neutrality on questions of privilege and oppression is actually evidence of its investment in systems of privilege and oppression. (shrink)

Some feminists have argued that the “master's tools” cannot be utilized for feminist projects. When read through the lens of non-ideal theory, Judith Butler's reevaluation of “autonomy” and “universality” and Peaches's engagement with guitar rock are instances in which implements of patriarchy are productively repurposed for feminist ends. These examples evince two criteria whereby one can judge the success of such an attempt: first, accessibility and efficacy; second, that the use is deconstructive of its own conditions.

The relationship between opera and gay subcultures (especially male), lifestyle practices and consumerism has been noted by cultural critics and musicologists - the former in affirmative terms, the latter largely hostile. This article explores this relationship initially through a review of the existing literature before concentrating on the striking affinities in the discursive construction of both cultural forms. In the modern era, both opera and homosexuality have been stigmatized and marginalized in their respective rationalizing ‘scientific’ domains: musicology and sexology. Both (...) have been authoritatively declared unhealthy, both reconstructed out of the distinctive repressions of Victorianism, both subsequently searching for inclusion and legitimacy. (shrink)

Overview essay of the field of feminist aesthetics updated Winter, 2021.

This is an overview of analytic philosophy of music. It is in five sections, as follows: 1. What Is Music? 2. Musical Ontology 3. Music and the Emotions 4. Understanding Music 5. Music and Value.

Taking the example of two 1960s popular spy films this paper explores how social semiotics can make a contribution to the analysis of film music. Followingother scholars who have sought to create inventories of sound meanings to help us break down the way that music communicates, this paper explores how wecan draw on the principles of Hallidayan functional grammar to present an inventory of meaning potentials in sound. This provides one useful way to describe thesemiotic resources available to composers to (...) allow them to communicate quite specific ideas, attitudes and identities through combinations of different sounds and sound qualities, by presenting them as systems of meaning rather than as lists of connotations. Here we apply this to the different uses of music and sound in Dr No and The Ipcress Files which allows us to show how we can reveal different ideologies of spying. (shrink)

The dimension of sound has long been considered completely missing from Flusser's thought, thus most Flusser research has not dealt with the auditive in his work so far. This article has a two-fold approach to counter this common perception; firstly, by looking at three texts in which Flusser deals with music and sound directly – “Chamber Music”, “The Gesture of Listening To Music” and “Hörigkeit/Hoerapparate”, and secondly by looking at Flusser's key text “Crisis of Linearity” which largely ignores sound. The (...) former tackles these lesser known texts to examine how Flusser actively applied music and sound in his work, whilst the latter uses methods of sound studies to critique the absence of sound in his important media-philosophical thesis. Flusser's writings on music and sound are both striking for the contemporaneity yet problematic for their demoded appearance of concepts such as “pure music”. Insights from contemporary sound studies question the dominance of the visual in Flusser's work and the epistemological consequences this might have. (shrink)