Conference Agenda

In recent decades, numerous scholars have explored the subfield of music, sound, and law through a range of different case studies. Most often, this research program looks to examples in which music and sound come into contact with positive law: for example, the criminalization of certain musicking practices, the admissibility of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials, or, what is by far the most robust topic, pluriform issues of copyright and intellectual property. While this scholarship is no doubt opening vital new avenues into research on the legal politics of music and sound, it nevertheless risks assuming the prior coherence of its two poles––music/sound and law––without interrogating the complex ways in which the law shapes our conception of music and, more unsettlingly, conceptions of sound and listening might influence the dominant legal imaginary.

In conversation with recent work that criticizes the foundations of sound and law (Robinson [2020], Reed [2021], Morrison [2024], Ochoa and Gaitán [forthcoming]), this paper explores this deeper interimbrication of sound and law through an unlikely case study: the U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823). Considered one of the foundational cases in the rationalization of U.S. settler-colonial jurisdiction over Indigenous lands, Johnson is a central text of American and Indigenous critical legal studies, but has hardly been considered in musicological scholarship. Through a close reading of Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision in light of both early American ethnological texts and contemporary anticolonial critique, I argue that the decision––which constructed settler dominion over Native lands via the infamous “Doctrine of Discovery”––was in fact rooted in a settler aurality that pretended to hear the Native voice while prejudicially assuming its uncivilized status.

By investigating the ways in which sound and listening form part of the “common sense” of state legal regimes, I aim to deepen music and sound scholars’ engagement with law, offering not just an instance in which the law judges a sound, but rather a model for understanding how a sensory paradigm and a legal paradigm can coemerge in the service of an oppressive power structure.

Historian of science Elizar Barkan identified in the 1930s USA a “retreat of race science”: a turn away from simplistic assumptions of the primacy of racialized nature over nurture, motivated by more sophisticated understandings of inheritance at home, and fear of science’s cooption by fascism abroad. A look at the history of music science, however, reveals a different story. The 1930s saw the crest of a wave of racialized studies on musical ability, motivated by the development of standardized tests for musical talent in the preceding decade, their endorsement both by educational institutions, and their adoption by one of the major promoters of hereditarian research, the American Eugenics Society. From 1925 to 1940, dozens of studies were conducted across the United States and beyond, that aimed to prove, via purported differences in musical ability, a general theory of innate racial difference.

Not all those who conducted these tests, however, did so in the name of eugenics. This paper considers attempts, in the 1920s and 30s, to turn musical race scientists’ methods on themselves—to use racialized studies on musical ability to disprove “hard” hereditarian attitudes about racial difference. After establishing a “state of the field” and considering other critiques leveled against musical race science, the paper focuses on the work of North Carolina scholar and anti-segregationist Guy B. Johnson, whose doctoral dissertation “Musical Talent and the Negro” attempted to prove, using data from standardized tests, that there was no difference in musical ability between Black and White test subjects. Drawing on archival evidence and new readings of published scientific texts, this paper examines Johnson’s multiple attempts to demolish (we might say) the master’s house with the master’s tools; and considers how these attempts were received—both by those he was seeking to critique, and those who were, nominally, on the same side.

Through returning to this early moment of what might be called, in modern terms, “anti-racist” music scholarship, this paper aims to focus attention on the affordances and limitations of musical interventions in wider fields of political struggle, when institutional support for such interventions is—for the moment—on the rise.

This paper critically engages with the prevailing state of musicological criticism, offering a nuanced analysis that challenges the reparative turn within the field. Focusing my criticism on voice studies and trauma studies, my essay explores the ambivalence faced by music studies as it grapples with identity knowledges. Rejecting both paranoid and reparative readings, I follow Robyn Wiegman’s (2012) theoretical interventions in queer feminist studies and advocate for a paradigmatic approach that reevaluates the relationship between the object we study (music) and the object we love (music).

I posit that musicology understands music as an exceptional practice, resting on the belief in universalizing relationality through "listening better." This musicological criticism is necessitated by a belief in music, art, and aesthetics as the means to construct the Subject, rendering it knowable to other Subjects. Drawing on scholars of Afro-pessimism, like Frank B. Wilderson (2020), I critique assumptions of voice and subjecthood and dare to question if exceptionalized identitarian bodies (e.g., the Asian body, the indigenous body, the disabled body, the queer body, the Black body) can truly have a voice—can be subjects in musicology or else objects of musicology.

I take as my case study the oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima by Toshio Hosokawa, who was born to two hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing, that never spoke of their survival during his upbringing. Though the spectacle of nuclear empire rouses many voices in protest, it is silence—political, ideological, aesthetic—that maintains imperial hegemony. I challenge the universalizing notion of voice as synonymous with subjecthood and examine the consequences of flattening the subject into a universal entity.

Is there a commons in music study? Is there space for solidarity? Or, given the unconscious belief/desire for musical universality, have we closed off the possibility of solidarity for the sake of a universality? If our utopic vision for the discipline is to “listen better,” what is the ideological core that structures that utopia?