The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice
The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice
by Marcus Boon
Duke University Press, 2022 Cloth: 978-1-4780-1576-5 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1839-1 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-2301-2 Library of Congress Classification ML3800.B76 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In The Politics of Vibration Marcus Boon explores music as a material practice of vibration. Focusing on the work of three contemporary musicians—Hindustani classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, Swedish drone composer and philosopher Catherine Christer Hennix, and Houston-based hip-hop musician DJ Screw—Boon outlines how music constructs a vibrational space of individual and collective transformation. Contributing to a new interdisciplinary field of vibration studies, he understands vibration as a mathematical and a physical concept, as a religious or ontological force, and as a psychological determinant of subjectivity. Boon contends that music, as a shaping of vibration, needs to be recognized as a cosmopolitical practice—in the sense introduced by Isabelle Stengers—in which what music is within a society depends on what kinds of access to vibration are permitted, and to whom. This politics of vibration constitutes the hidden ontology of contemporary music because the organization of vibration shapes individual music scenes as well as the ethical choices that participants in these scenes make about how they want to live in the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Marcus Boon is Professor of English at York University, author of In Praise of Copying and The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, and coauthor of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism.
REVIEWS
"The boldest aspect of Boon's argument . . . is his move to the level of ontology—to the nature of being or reality itself. For him music's social and racial significance operates not at the level of social codes or experience, but as an intervention in how reality itself is organised: 'music does tell us something about being.' His framework certainly allows a place for aspects of music-making that usually get screened out of modern criticism: its religious power, its role in many cultures' sense of the world's structure. . . ."
-- Dan Barrow The Wire
"This book is a wonderful contribution to the burgeoning field of vibrational studies and so-called 'esoteric' music. ... It prompts new insights into the relationship of music to time, community, politics, and philosophy, offering new perspectives for those interested in how music can be looped into new knowledges being generated within the field of sound studies."
-- Cat Hope Journal of Sonic Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction. Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice 1 1. Lord’s House, Nobody’s House: Pandit Pran Nath and Music as Sadhana 29 2. The Drone of the Real: The Sound-Works of Catherine Christer Hennix 75 3. Music and the Continuum 125 4. Slowed and Throwed: DJ Screw and the Decolonization of Time 179 Coda. July 2, 2020 227 Acknowledgments 231 Notes 235 Bibliography 255 Index 269
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