Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound
Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Editors: Jairo Moreno (UPenn) and Gavin Steingo(Princeton)
Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound offers a space from which to engage urgent questions currently animating the humanities from the perspectives of music, sound, and listening. Tied together by a common epistemological attitude, the books in this series reconstitute the place of scholarship in response to a world rapidly transforming under economic and technological integration, on the one hand, and political and social disintegration, on the other. Authors articulate new musical and sonic relations to the composition of the political, the social, and the economic, while developing new ways to analyze music's ever-shifting associations with aurality, human/non-human divides, materiality, nature, and ontology. These relations and associations in turn provoke new questions about the past, and a reassessment of our historical and ethnographic priorities-both empirical and speculative. The series urges philosophical and theoretical critique to mediate and question the relationship of music studies to other forms of knowledge production. What it proposes, therefore, is, a form of conjunctural analysis that does not foreclose in advance how sound, music, and other forces are or have been articulated together. "Conjuncture" captures the immediate and mobile sets of circumstances determining the present, which authors engage by challenging theoretical categories and forms from a variety of disciplinary, historical, or geographical homes.
Current Titles
Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos
Andrew Hicks
Winner, Society for Music Theory, Emerging Scholar Award (2018)
"We can hear the universe!" This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient gravitational-wave signal."
Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration
Naomi Waltham-Smith
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community?
The Musical Gift: Sonic Generosity in Post-War Sri Lanka
Jim Sykes
Winner Bruno Nettl Award, Society for Ethnomusicology (2019)
The Musical Gift tells Sri Lanka's music history as a story of giving between humans and nonhumans, and between populations defined by difference.
AUDIBLE INFRASTRUCTURES: MUSIC, SOUND, MEDIA
KYLE DEVINE AND ALEXANDRINE BOUDREAULT-FOURNIER, EDS.
Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize, Society for Ethnomusicology, 2023.
Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters. Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities — resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste — this book provides a concerted archaeology of music's media infrastructures…In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.
WILD SOUND: MARYANNE AMACHER AND THE TENSES OF AUDIBLE LIFE
AMy Cimini
Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher's multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, hypothetical creatures and virtual, fictive or distanciated environments. Author Amy Cimini explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play, and narrative transport.