Conference Agenda

This joint session interrogates and explores Black music as a site for the expression of Black life and world-making. We examine diverse case studies to stage dialogues between musicology, music theory, Black studies, and Black feminism, arguing for renewed attention to Black music as a medium for Black togetherness. These communal spaces are not homogeneous in their constitution, mediums, or goals; they lie between/in the break/at the interstices of overriding conceptions of Blackness. What links them all, however, is that their aesthetic, metaphysical, and intellectual activities support and promote Black life and agency in the face of anti-Blackness. By crossing a range of spatial, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries, we address some of the ways Black kinship and community have emerged through musical practice and shed light on the hidden/silenced histories of Black (musical) knowledge production and transmission.

Gomez challenges reductive theorizations of Blackness-as-death by considering the process of world-making enabled by Black music within what literary theorist Hortense Spillers has theorized as an “interstice.” Engaging with Black American literary studies and linguistic anthropology, he elucidates how Black music has functioned as a protected space for Black life, enabling the formation and reclamation of real and imagined genealogies of Black (musical) history.

Hannaford theorizes Mary Lou Williams’s New York City apartment as a gendered and racialized music-theoretical space that disrupts conventional histories of both music theory and Black music. Drawing on research in Williams’s archive, Hannaford situates Williams’s apartment meetings as part of this insurgent, fugitive tradition of music theory, which functions in service of Black creative, social, and political freedom.

Lomanno introduces the notion of "the Chthonic," the under/other-worldly realm that lies below the Earth's surface, as a germinal space from which Black sound ecologies emerge. Connecting jazz performance practice, ecocriticism, and religious studies in Black American and Afro-Atlantic contexts, Lomanno analyzes insurgent forms of kinship in opposition to anti-Black violence that attempt to sever ties among Afro-Atlantic diasporic communities and their traditions of ancestral rememory and posthumanist ecology.

Too often, and too readily, Blackness has been conceived of necropolitically, or as coterminous with death (cf. Mbembe; and Patterson). Though there is good reason for this, I nevertheless want to explore what would come of following literary theorist Kevin Quashie’s call to “imagine a black world” (2021); and further, to imagine a Black world with music at its center. In this paper, I aim to answer Quashie’s charge by offering a theorization of Black music’s location in the interstice (Spillers 2003) between Blackness and “the Black” (Moten 2018). The Black musical interstice allows for the possibilities of Black life to flourish beyond the delimitations of hierarchized racial life in an anti-Black world, preventing the kind of overt theft or appropriation enabled by anti-Blackness.

Instead, I argue that the thievery of Black music is not only always already “botched”—as Ronald Radano (2013) has remarked—but is impossible, as the Black artists within the interstice are always “presenced” in and by the performances of Black music; ever present as a “specter” that cannot be erased, silenced, or hidden by rhetorical or discursive avoidance (McKittrick 2021). Invocations of and engagement with the interstice is not just theoretical, but real in its music-semiotic properties, embodied in the indexical and symbolic gestures made by musicians and caught by listeners who recognize and understand these musics as Black (Silverstein 1976, 2004). I further argue that engagements with the Black musical interstice are not, and have never been, solely about resistance, but about a being with through different modalities of participation in Black music-making.

In thinking through this line of inquiry, I draw robustly on the field of Black studies, particularly the novels of writer and literary critic Toni Morrison, whose literary and critical works demonstrate the integral role that music has and continues to connect Blackness and “the Black” in different times, spaces, and genres. Ultimately, this paper contributes to ongoing Black philosophical and theoretical discourses on critical importance of music to Black life and Blackness.

Mary Lou Williams’s New York City apartment famously served as a gathering place for the city’s burgeoning beboppers in the early 1940s. Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, and Sarah Vaughan, among others, workshopped their musical ideas, soliciting Williams’s suggestions (Kernodle 2004). Williams curated a safe space for these musicians to explore new musical possibilities, span records to help remove writer’s block, offered advice on the jazz business, and aided with personal issues, recalling Vanessa Blais-Tremblay’s notion of pedagogical “care ethics” (2019).

But what did Williams and the young beboppers talk about when they workshopped their music? What ideas about musical composition and improvisation circulated around this forum? Various documents in Williams’s archive reflect her unrecognized appetite for music analysis and music theory. Over the course of her career she sketched copious harmonic and voice-leading variations, copied excerpts from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, sketched theories of polytonality, and deployed serial processes to generate original atonal melodies. These music theoretical and analytical traces intimate some of the activities within Williams’s apartment, coupling music theory with a kind of insurgent Black musical activity.

This paper conceptualizes music theory as a site of abstract, speculative work in service of Black creativity and life. I explore the resonances between Williams’s form of music theory and the gendered dimensions of her semi-private space, the “care ethics” of collaborative learning, and histories of both jazz and music theory. Drawing on Daphne Brook’s (2021) and Katherine McKittrick’s (2021) recent work on Black (feminist) music making as both knowledge production and preservation, Philip Harper’s exploration of abstraction in African American expression (2015), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s “Black study” (2013), and Jarvis Givens’s “fugitive pedagogy” (2021), I foreground the insurgent, fugitive aspects of Williams’s music theory, pointing to a larger music theoretical genealogy grounded in African American musical practice. My work challenges conventional histories of both music theory and Black music; I argue that music theory has ignored Black music theorists who worked largely outside of academic institutions, and I scrutinize the music theoretical forms and content that are usually only briefly mentioned in histories of Black music.

In the 2014 documentary Zeb's House, saxophonist Jimmy Heath shares a critique of contemporary jazz performance, saying "[If] you can put all those odd meters in four-four time, it's great! You got a feeling there…Don't leave the feeling of the music for the science of the music. I think you have to have science and soul." Heath's "science and soul" aesthetic of polymetricality recalls W.E.B. DuBois's double consciousness and Nathaniel Mackey's characterization of Legba in the New World. Taking Heath's aesthetic dyad literally and inspired by Britt Rusert's exploration of Black empiricism through the arts as "fugitive science," this presentation highlights Black American and Afro-Atlantic jazz musicians—such as Don Cherry, Abbey Lincoln, and Nduduzo Makhathini—who practice sustainable community-building through their performances and recording projects that feature intercultural, collaborative fusions of musical systems, aesthetics informed by Black and posthumanist political ecologies, and strong connections to diasporic spiritual practices. Through science, soul, and sound, these musicians' ecologically-minded, spiritually informed, and posthumanist kinships are part of a history of Black American and Afro-Atlantic communities of care that model more inclusive forms of collectivity grafted together in opposition to oppressive and unjust systems that continually work to sever ancestral and diasporic linkages through anti-Black epistemological and physical violence, including the conventions of academic disciplinarity.

In this presentation I subsume all these kinships—and the aesthetics of Black ecocriticism that inform them—within the concept of "the Chthonic," the under/other-worldly realm that lies below the Earth's surface. Chthonic spaces function as rich zones of germinating potentialities; steadying grounds on which bodies rest; conduits to nonhuman lifecycles; networks to distant terrestrial lands; and gateways to ancestral, cosmic, and godly planes. Recasting past figurations of the Black Underground as manifestations of chthonic interconnectivity links their creative practices with other fugitive sciences such as foodways, literary, medicinal, and spiritual practices, sites from which these Black ecocritical collectivities spring. Invoking Chthonic potentialities from the subterranean, submarine, and underworldly, these traditions of generational rememory celebrate the cyclical patterns of decomposition and rebirth through rites of conjure, storytelling, and emergent kinship that characterize the sonic sciences of Black American music.