You Can’t Trust Music

Aristophanes, Aristophanes: The Birds and Other Plays, trans. David Barrett and Alan Sommerstein (Penguin Classics, 1978).

The title of this essay, “You can’t trust music,” is a quotation from Bill Dietz and Gavin Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” boundary 2 43, no. 1 (2016): 43.

Philip K. Dick, “The Preserving Machine,” Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 1 (1975): 22–23.

Dick, “The Preserving Machine,” 23.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1969), 249. Allen Dunn explains that Benjamin purchased Angelus Novus from Klee immediately after its completion in 1920 and tried on several occasions to peddle the image as a starting point for a number of ventures, including a namesake publication. “Through repeated references to the painting, Benjamin often balances his own moral economy by creating a rhetorical narrative that relies on the linearity of history told from a single perspective.” Allen Dunn, “The Pleasures of the Text: Angelus Novus,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 84, no. 1–2 (2001): 3.

Holly Watkins, “Musical Ecologies of Place and Placelessness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 405.

Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell University Press, 2007), 3. Leach elaborates: The “performer of music is under an obligation not just to make musical sounds but to understand them as music, that is, as proportions that are rational. The listener is also under an obligation to understand sounds in this way, whether or not their performing agent does so” (3).

Kant says that “a bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it, and thus to offer more for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. Nicholas Walker, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford University Press, 2008), 73.

Luis F. Baptista and Sandra L. L. Gaunt. “Advances in Studies of Avian Sound Communication,” The Condor 96, no. 3 (1994): 820.

Jacob Smith, Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015), 50.

Quoted in Ronald Bogue, “Minority, Territory, Music,” in Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2007), 20.

Bogue, “Minority, Territory, Music,” 29.

Ann Arnold, “Bushfires Devastate Rare and Enchanting Wildlife as ‘Permanently Wet’ Forests Burn for First Time,” ABC News, November 26, 2019 →.

Bogue, “Minority, Territory, Music,” 32.

Maryanne Amacher, “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a ‘Perceptual Geography,’” FO(A)RM, no. 3 (2004): 16.

“The vocabulary of virtuality overlaps with semiotic studies that frame musical experience as an encounter with virtual agents.” Watkins, “Musical Ecologies,” 405.

Watkins, “Musical Ecologies,” 405.

Coralie Hancock-Barnett, “Colonial Resettlement and Cultural Resistance: The Mbira Music of Zimbabwe,” Social and Cultural Geography 13, no. 1 (2012): 11–27.

Watkins, “Musical Ecologies,” 405.

Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Duke University Press, 2012), 84.

Karen Barad speaks of “an embodied re-membering of the past which, against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance and the related desire to set time aright, calls for thinking a certain undoing of time; a work of mourning more accountable to, and doing justice to, the victims of ecological destruction and of racist, colonialist, and nationalist violence, human and otherwise—those victims who are no longer there, and those yet to come.” Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics, vol. 92 (2018): 59.

Barad, “Troubling Time/s,” 60

Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 135.

Susan McClary, “The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,” in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge, 1987), 13–62.

W. T. Wallace, N. Siddiqua, and A. K. M. Harun-ar-Rashid, “Memory for Music: Effects of Melody on Recall of Text,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20, no. 6 (1994): 1477.

Amacher, “Psychoacoustic Phenomena,” 10.

Olga Petri and Peter Howell, ”From the Dawn Chorus to the Canary Choir: Notes on the Unnatural History of Birdsong,” Humanimalia 11, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 168.

Bill Dietz and Gavin Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” boundary 2 43, no. 1 (2016): 70.

Dietz and Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” 70.

“Adorno extolls the anti-choreography of postwar music—music to which (in theory) no one could bob one’s head, sing along, or march in step—to be a reaction to war-time orchestras.” Dietz and Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” 45.

Even “Marx knew only too well (that) simply uncovering the social relations and necessary labor time behind commodities through analysis does not lead to the end of capitalism.” Dietz and Gavin Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” 58.

In Feld’s studies, the Kaluli make a distinction between birds and bats, despite their obvious similarities as flying creatures. Kaluli will openly discuss the avian nature of bats, but if asked directly, “Are bats birds?” the answer is a fairly immediate “no,” followed by, “It has no voice.” Feld, Sound and Sentiment, 84.

Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974): 438.

Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), 20, 24.

John Lennon’s famous anti-war plea starts and stops at asking listeners to “Imagine” a better world. It amounts to a rather apathetic call for action: to dream about a better world, without really doing anything about it. “You may say I’m a dreamer / But I’m not the only one / I hope someday you’ll join us / And the world will live as one.” Lennon sings about a privileged refusal to act—dreaming, sleeping, and being photographed in bed while the world burns. By contrast, Kendrick Lamar sings about why he can’t get any rest in his 2012 song “Sing About Me, I’m Dyin’ of Thirst”: “Maybe ‘cause I’m a dreamer and sleep is the cousin of death / Really stuck in the scheme of wondering when I’ma rest.” To dream can be fatal, if you aren’t rich.

Martha Kenney, “Fables of Response-ability: Feminist Science Studies as Didactic Literature,” Catalyst 5, no. 1 (2019): 6, 43.

Dietz and Steingo, “Experiments in Civility,” 43.

Adorno, as quoted in Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “John Cage oder Die freigelassene Musik,” in Die freigelassene Musik: Schriften zu John Cage, ed. Rainer Riehn and Florian Neuener (Klever Verlag, 2012), 10. Trans. Bill Dietz.