Forms of Listening in Contemporary Politics
Chair(s): Anna Yu Wang (Princeton University,), Sumanth Gopinath (University of Minnesota)
Discussant(s): Michael Gallope (University of Minnesota)
Politically divisive current events have loomed large in recent gatherings of the AMS and SMT communities. Both Vijay Iyer’s 2024 SMT keynote “What’s left of music theory?” and Suzanne Cusick’s 2023 AMS Presidential Endowed Plenary Lecture “Dreaming Reparative Musicologies in a Paranoid Time” included poignant and existentially charged reflections on political issues including the ongoing wars, the climate crisis, and US policies on abortion and gun violence. In 2024, the SMT Professional Development Committee put on a panel titled “Navigating Sensitive Topics,” which addressed new policies limiting diversity initiatives in education. These and other recent publications (e.g., Bourne, Lumsden, Bazayev 2024; Waltham-Smith 2024) illuminate how our work as musicologists and theorists are inextricable from the fractured ideological landscape of contemporary politics.
Building on this conversation, this panel advances the view that key questions and methods in musicology and theory—in particular, our disciplinary attentiveness to listening practices—are not frivolous or peripheral to present-day political matters but position us to scrutinize and possibly mitigate some of these challenges. This panel meditates on the capacities and mechanisms of listening in such fraught contexts by contending with the intersection between listening and identity, ideological division, and the aesthetic and affective dimensions of political expression, all with a slant towards recent political events.
The first paper theorizes the aurality of political life as centered around listening rather than around the use of political speech or voice, and demonstrates how anti-democratic conditions can operate as impediments to forms of listening. The second paper responds to ever-increasing anti-DEI bills in higher education by offering a pedagogy of affective listening based on Resmaa Menakem’s notion of somatic abolitionism that helps us maintain the radical potential of the classroom (hooks 1994). The third paper draws on theories from sound studies and cross-cultural musical listening to formulate an acoustic model of listening that explains why it can feel impossible, in a polarized discursive space, to hear what others are saying as anything but inchoate or offensive.
The three papers will be presented back-to-back, each lasting twenty minutes. Michael Gallope will give a ten-minute response, then the floor will be open for twenty minutes of questions to all panelists.
Presentations of the Symposium
Clogged Ears, Undemocratic Times
Andrew Chung
University of North Texas
Following Naomi Waltham-Smith’s (2024) arguments for reframing free speech debates and democratic politics not around uses of political speech and voice but around listening, this presentation theorizes how impediments to listening get operationalized within political disenfranchisement and marginalization.
My first case study examines a 2021 incident during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in which members of the Anti-Police Terror Project filmed a police officer who demanded the protesters remove a banner they had legally displayed. The officer began playing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” over his smartphone’s loudspeaker, attempting to render the protesters’ video of the interaction unpostable on YouTube by contaminating it with sound that would be flagged by YouTube’s copyright infringement algorithm. This action not only represents a musicalized attempt to suppress protestors’ political speech; it relies on clogging the algorithm’s ears by targeting its hyperacuity for copyrighted sound.
My second case study theorizes how a problem of listening lies within what sociologist Jennifer Walter calls the shock and awe campaign of the second Trump presidency’s barrage of sweeping executive orders in its opening weeks. Such tactics certainly mobilize politically disenfranchising speech, orders, and directives from the voice of the state. But Walters explains that such mechanisms use “chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist.” I argue that Trump’s use of political overwhelm obeys a logic of noise comparable to Suzanne Cusick’s (2008) analysis of loud music played for long durations to interrogate detainees in the U.S. war on terror, a technique meant to disrupt detainees’ circuitries of thought and perceptions of their surroundings. Trump’s tactics similarly aim to scramble the political opposition’s ability to hear itself think, and to thwart their capacities to listen clearly for how political dissensus and counter-organizing might coalesce effectively.
Listening emerges as a site of anti-democratic attack operating through stratagems that can remain obscured when analysis centers upon uses of political speech and voice. Consequently, this presentation calls for scholars in music and sound studies to regard the analysis of the aurality of undemocratic power as a central disciplinary priority in our undemocratic times.
A Pedagogy of Event-Listening
Vivian Luong
University of Oklahoma
As of early 2025, eighteen anti-DEI bills have been signed into law in the United States. These bills form a multi-pronged strategy to dismantle DEI initiatives on college campuses—from prohibiting diversity statements in admissions and hiring to removing DEI centers and positions, and increasing surveillance of faculty, staff, and students whose promotion of “political ideology” could result in the loss of state funding for their home institutions. While DEI initiatives are reformist rather than radical interventions (Lett 2023), this presentation contemplates how the classroom might remain a potentially radical, liberatory space despite the anti-DEI legal regime (hooks 1994). Focusing on musicological and music theory pedagogy specifically, I explore how our disciplines’ shared investment in attentive listening can sustain the classroom’s radical potential. If we are indeed professionally close listeners, might a case be made that a pedagogy of close listening involves techniques of attending to the pain, joy, and other affects that arise when we listen together?
Experimenting with this premise, I propose a form of listening centered on affective literacy and care. Borrowing Erin Manning’s term “event-care” (2016), I elaborate a practice of “event-listening” that deeply tunes into the ordinary goings-on of our classrooms as emergent events (Stewart 2007; Massumi 2015). Listening this way involves attending to the affective “background hums” that resonate in our bodies (Berlant 2011). Such hums include discomforting musical encounters entangled in harmful structures that make the university classroom possible (Robinson 2019; Snaza 2023). To give texture to these structures and the practice of event-listening, I adapt “somatic abolitionist” techniques developed by trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem (2017 and 2022). In particular, I share my own experience of enacting these listening exercises in my musical bodies seminar taught in an anti-DEI state. Finally, I conclude by situating event-listening with concerns about diversity work in the academy as emotionally and physically taxing labor that too often falls on minoritized, contingent faculty (Horse and Nakagawa 2020; Vágnerová and García Molina 2018). Ultimately, if we choose to claim the classroom as a valued space for change, we must also listen to our academic labor structures and its effects too.
Inter-ideological Acoustics: A Model of Listening for a Divided Society
Anna Yu Wang
Princeton University
In this polarized political moment, the very same sonic expressions can trigger a whiplash of contradicting meanings and affects. What makes certain utterances polarizing? And how must we approach listening if we hope to pierce through that interpretive volatility and form sustainable relationships across differences? Taking in earnest Chua and Rehding’s (2021) call to throw open music theory’s “epistemological relevance,” I propose that music theory, as a field concerned with deep listening, is well-positioned to address these questions.
I begin by unpacking a point of commonality between musical and political listening: both involve a slippage whereby utterances that are heard as aesthetically inchoate also tend to be intuited as ideologically abhorrent, and vice versa. Illustrative case studies I supply include the divided reception of popular music, Sinitic opera timbres, the “Black Lives Matter” protest slogan, and the “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. These listening acts are extraordinary not merely as sites of interpretive rupture, but also as propositions of identity (Cherry 2021). Put another way, listening can bestow a polarizing edge upon sounds when the affects they circulate are existential, deriving from the affirmation or denial of identity.
If listening is bound up in existential affects, then we risk obscuring the complexity of its mechanisms when we construe listening as an individualized, internalized activity. Rather, listening is better modeled as an ecological phenomenon, one that reveals the intertwinement of beings. Inspired by theories of intermaterial vibration (Eidsheim 2015) and atmospheric voice (Daughtry 2021), I suggest that listening is akin to acoustic feedback: it extends the vibrating physical surfaces of the acoustic environment that receives and reprojects sounds back at their makers. Like the visceral, sensuous experience of hearing one’s own voice in different acoustic spaces only to flinch at its jarring alienness, the way we listen tempers how others hear themselves. Viewed through this ecological frame, listening proves to be a forcefully existential act that holds sway over whether others will continue taking the risk of releasing their sound into the refractive physics of the larger acoustic environment, or withdraw into narrower spaces of self-preservation (i.e., echo chambers).