Artful Design Chapter 7 Reflection, by Wesley Larlarb

I found the social design chapter to be in some ways extremely affirming and powerful; I believe strongly that social interactions are intrinsic goods which should not be automated away by technology. Applying this to music, I too take issue with the Western/American notion that music should be made in a consumer/producer paradigm, and I really appreciate music which is made in some part by the audience and for the performers. Indeed, a vision of music where the performers derive no enjoyment and the audience has no agency brings to mind huge commercial concerts, broadway musicals which have been on for decades, and radio stations playing the same pop songs on every channel. There’s nothing wrong with these phenomena in and of themselves, but I think they tip the balance strongly in the direction of music as performance over music as participation.  It’s somewhat rare to find an American who loves going to musical jam sessions or just playing with friends for fun, but it’s insanely common to find people who are obsessed with huge recording artists or multimillion dollar movie score/theatre productions. By contrast, I’ve been watching Jon Batiste perform on the streets of New York City and finding such a compelling alternative to the commercialized version of mass music which is so valued in our society. I really appreciate the vision of Ocarina, Glee Karaoke, and Leaf Trombone in promoting this kind of participatory music.

As one qualifying component of all this, I will add that I take some issues with the chapter’s treatment/skirting of the topic of cultural tradition and identity as important factors in the social interaction of music. In particular, on page 363 there is a picture of a group of Black women dancing in an apparently participatory setting, along with a quote questioning whether identity is important in a musical setting, or whether it’s merely important that those participating have taken part in a common activity. Last year I took an ethnomusicology class called “Musical Cultures of The World,” in which we broke down the idea of music as a “universal language” which all people can understand and use to communicate. Too often in the last 50 years of American history, the argument that music is universal has been used to justify the continued elevation of European Classical tradition, and Western music in general as the pinnacle of musical achievement, while essentializing many foreign genres of music into vastly oversimplified categories like “Indian,” “Asian,” “Arab,” “Latin,” etc. In this class, the professor made a very convincing argument that putting cultures into boxes based on the posthumous construction of a “classical music” I.e. “Indian classical music” made it easy for imperialist nations to justify the treatment of subjugated peoples based on the evaluations of their cultures through a European lens, a lens which was presumed to represent a “universal music.” It was this notion of music as a universal language which also spawned the genre of “World Music,” which continues in some ways to be a way of selling a vision of nonwestern cultures as backwards and unmodern through the othering of their music, and the relegation of it to “traditional/ancient” forms. Perhaps nowhere has this particular treatment of music from nonwestern cultures been worse than in the caricature of African music which has so often blurred the view of all African music into one genre, simplistic and somehow more “instinctive/primal,” harkening back to racist views of Africans as savages. I’m quite sure that Ge never intended to invoke this history when using a photo of a group of Black women wearing pink dresses and dancing together from an unspecified culture with unspecified traditions. Nonetheless, employing this photo as a representation of “participatory” music without further explanation of the dance that people are actually doing in the picture or how this fits into their society does feel like a highly dangerous move given the history of the concepts of “music as a universal language” and “world music.”