Music and Social Justice _ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

8/18/2019 Music and Social Justice _ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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Music and Social Justice

Protests demanding social justice as the alternative to an unacceptable status quo have been

mounted in response to war, political and social inequality, poverty, and other constraints

on economic and development opportunities. Although social justice is typically thought of

as a political agenda, many justice movements have used music as a way of inviting and

maintaining broad-based participation in their initiatives.

Some of this integration of music and social justice has become so deeply embedded in the

identity and culture frameworks of particular groups that it is understood today primarily as

culturally constitutive. For instance, the tradition of the blues is widely recognized as a

distinctively African-American contribution to music, but is not always recognized for its

role helping to shape the political consciousness of African-American communities

emerging from Reconstruction in the nineteenth century and migrating out of the American

South in the twentieth century. The same is true of the interplay between the free jazz of the

1960s and the black-nationalist movement it helped to nurture. Other moments in music

and social justice appear in our social and historical narratives less as integration than as

accidental convergences which we do not always notice or remember. Examples of music

dropping out of the politics, rather than politics dropping out of the music, include cultural

inattention to the role music has played in later social protests taking place under the

banners of the Occupy movement and UK-Uncut, and to the crucial role that music played in

the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The paradigm for reciprocity of musical

expression and commitment to social justice, on the other hand, is the political protest

culture of the United States in the 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam

War movement, in particular.

In his book Rhythm and Resistance, p. 39, Ray Pratt observes that “No music alone can

organize one’s ability to invest affectively in the world, [but] one can note powerful

contributions of music to temporary emotional states.” It is because of the way music feeds

into our emotional lives and because of the sense of social well-being we get from sharing

emotional states with others that music so frequently accompanies movements that build,and depend upon, solidarity. This is a contingent association, to be sure, but the absence of

logical necessity does not diminish the powerful role music plays in our efforts to build a

better world.

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Table of Contents

1. Musical Traditions

a. Origins and Impacts of Blues and Jazz

b. Folk Music, Rock Music, and Protest Songs

c. Post-industrial Musical Contestation: Disco, Punk, and Hip-hop

2. Contemporary Protesta. Communal and Community-based Music Making in Democratic States

b. Building Social Solidarity against Neo-liberalism

c. Confrontations with Authoritarian Regimes

3. Academic Attention to Music-Politics Links

a. Social Aesthetics

b. Improvisation Theory

c. Peace through Art

4. References and Further Reading

1. Musical Traditions

Social transformation effected through music—so-called Peace through Art—is an approach

that has been under-theorized. One of the few theorizers and practitioners who seeks to

advance our understanding of social justice through art and music is John Paul Lederach,

whose peace-building work focuses on conflict transformation through sonic capacities to

promote social healing. His work with fractured communities emphasizes the restoration of

voice, a concept he has found particularly resonant with people who are struggling to repair

their violent communities (110, 89). The music and poetry that can aid in this repair is

various and highly contextual; to be meaningful to the community who is seeking social

justice, the music that accompanies justice-building must be—or be connected to—an

organic part of the community’s everyday life. In the interest of providing a sense of the

sonic diversity of effective musical backdrops, this account of music and social justice is

introduced through a discussion of musical types and traditions.

a. Origins and Impacts of Blues and Jazz

One of the most influential historians of the blues is Amiri Baraka who, writing as Leroi

Jones in his first book Blues People, explores the African-American experience of the nation

through music. The blues, he explains, is the response of African abductees to their

American enslavement, a cultural outpouring developed from work songs and spirituals

which represents in microcosm the entire range and nuance of a people’s adaptation to aforeign land they were given no choice but to make into a home. This history of adaptation

Baraka traces is one in which the songs become more complex and more secular, leaving

aside the theme of deliverance into heaven that characterized African-American musical

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production in slavery in favor of a more immediately empowering emphasis on self-

determination. The blues thus functioned as a repository of cultural engagement, its lyrical

content evolving over time to reflect whatever social challenges African-American

communities were facing at the time. One notable instance of blues reflecting African-

American struggles for respect and legitimacy in the public sphere was the 1941

collaboration between jazz great Count Basie and author Richard Wright (of Native Son

fame) on a piece called King Joe (The Joe Louis Blues) that valorized the boxer as the pride

of his community at the same moment that anti-lynching campaigns were finally starting to

gain traction in the Jim Crow South.

Both Baraka and Albert Murray, another prominent African-American historian of uniquely

American music, tell the story of jazz in such a way as to underscore its birth out of the

blues. For Baraka, one of the more coherent ways of defining jazz is as a synthesis of

European instrumentation and the African-derived polyrhythms that, fundamentally, are

the blues—even as jazz developed its own trajectory. Murray’s tracing of this history in

Stomping the Blues reiterates this common heritage but concentrates so much on jazz and

jazz musicians that a reader who comes to his book looking for an analysis of the blues may

feel shortchanged. Yet another treatment of the emergence of the blues and jazz, in Frank

Kofsky’s Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, tells the story of jazz through a

narrative reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a story of

problem-solving within paradigms that finally, inevitably, break down and must be replaced

—as in the case of the shift of musicians like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman from tryingto work their ideas out in bebop to an embrace of free jazz.

Kofsky too endorses the thesis that music and socio-political relations go hand in hand,

arguing that we can see in the free jazz that emerged in the early 1960s a kind of “proto-

nationalism” which presaged the black nationalist messages of Malcolm X, the Black

Panthers, and other “do for self” movements in African-American communities during the

1960s. These movements stressed the need for community self-sufficiency in the face of a

systemically racist white majoritarian society and although the black nationalist (a.k.a. black separatist) message was often simplistically opposed to the integrationism attributed to

Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, their community development efforts—

after-school arts programs for children, musical benefits to feed people struggling with food

insecurity, “neighborhood watch” security efforts—still stand as tangible models for

grassroots solidarity. The self-sufficiency message Kofsky finds in jazz proto-nationalism is

a celebration of a unique African-American aesthetic, one that contested the aesthetic

imperialism of the white critics who promoted the value and determined the negotiating

power of the mostly black musicians within the system of white-owned recording and

performance institutions. At the height of the free jazz movement, self-sufficiency

imperatives were the driving force behind the independent recording facilities and


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cooperatively owned performance venues with which Coltrane, Coleman, and Charles

Mingus, among others, experimented. They were also a factor in the political stances taken

by many of the free jazz musicians—anti-war, anti-colonialism, anti-enslavement, and

broadly supportive of the Pan-Africanism that flourished in the wake of African

decolonization movements. Its most enduring legacy, however, was the credence it gave to a

counter-narrative about what constituted aesthetic value. White critics used a theoretical

framework developed for Western art music (so-called classical music) to evaluate the

originality, authenticity, and artistic complexity of a musical tradition that came out of the

African-American experience. But, as a reading of Kofsky’s history together with Henry

Louis Gates Jr.’s literary theory in The Signifying Monkey makes clear, the black musicians

immersed in the jazz world were developing their own aesthetic—a conception of, for

instance, the value of originality that rejects the Eurocentric ideal of the original (as

something that has never before been seen in this world) in favor of an understanding that

one makes an original contribution when one adds one’s own perspective to an existing

cultural product. This revision of what originality means implicates the individual

empowerment and attention to existing and nascent community networks that black

nationalism’s later advocacy of self-sufficiency promoted.

b. Folk Music, Rock Music, and Protest Songs

The protest songs of folk music have a long history of engagement with social justice

struggles for abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, and other human rights agendas, butreally began to assert their power during the unionization drives emerging out of the

industrialization of wealthy societies. In the United States, some of the most recognizable of

these songs that came out of the labor movement include “John Henry” and “Which Side

Are You On?” While folk music developed its reputation as the voice of social justice in

America in no small part due to the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan,

perhaps the protest song that has had the most profound effect on American political life is

the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit.”

This song’s lyrics were written Jewish schoolteacher Abel Meeropol (who adopted the

orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple executed in 1953 by the US

government on the charge that they passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union) in the 1930s

as a response to a grisly photograph of a lynching. Recorded by Billie Holiday and

performed as one of her signature pieces, “Strange Fruit” became a widely-heard protest

against social injustice, a schooling of audiences about the realities of African-American

lives (and deaths) in parts of the United States that practiced lynching (“Strange Fruit: The

film” Independent Lens). Jazz critic Leonard Feather once said of “Strange Fruit” that it was

“the first significant protest in words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism”

(Margolick). Given the history of African-American activism and oratory, Feather’s claim


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about its ‘first-ness’ is best parsed as hyperbole, but there is no denying the impact this song

had on Holiday’s audiences. Margolick recounts fights breaking out in nightclubs after it

was performed and Billie Holiday herself being attacked by distraught and traumatized

patrons. Despite the emotional toll that singing “Strange Fruit” had on her, Holiday

apparently felt a duty to perform it. “I have to sing it,” Margolick quotes her as saying; “[it]

goes a long way in telling how they mistreat Negroes down South.” And the impact of the

song did play a part in efforts at changing social policy: some of the people who endorsed

passage of federal anti-lynching laws sent recordings of “Strange Fruit” to members of

Congress, presumably because they felt hearing it would produce an awakening of the

legislators’ moral outrage. “Strange Fruit” holds its power, even with the passage of time,

and has been called “one of the 10 songs that actually changed the world” (see the November

2003 issue of Q Magazine, a British music magazine).

In the world of rock music—the style that emerged from mainstream white America’s

assimilation of rhythm and blues—there is another paradigmatic intersection of music and

social justice that can be understood as a rock parallel to folk music’s “Strange Fruit.” More

than forty years ago, Jimi Hendrix and the somewhat thrown-together band that was

forming in the wake of the Jimi Hendrix Experience played a two hour set as the final

musical act of the Woodstock Festival, a performance most remembered for their

improvisation upon the American national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Daley 52,

55). This moment that has come to symbolize the essence of Woodstock was a masterful

performance, and critique, of an anthem whose lyrics valorize the resilience of a peopleunder attack. Shifting between faithful rendition and strategic distortion, Hendrix forcefully

shows his audience the moral inconsistency of a nation that sang this song at the same time

as it dropped bombs on the people of other nations. The sounds Hendrix pulls out of the

guitar in that iconic performance are reminiscent of explosions and squeals of horror at

exactly the points one who is singing along would get to “the rockets’ red glare” and “bombs

bursting in air.” The message that seems to have entered the popular imagination as a result

of Hendrix’s improvisation on “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock is very clearly an

anti-war, anti-imperialist one. In his book Crosstown Traffic, British music journalistCharles Murray concludes that Hendrix’s performance “depicts, as graphically as a piece of

music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to

themselves” (C. Murray 24; quoted in Daley 57).

c. Post-industrial Musical Contestation: Disco, Punk, andHip-hop

The music that accompanied industrial decline in Western industrialized nations—notably

the United States and the United Kingdom—articulated two distinct responses to the

foreclosure of empowerment and idealism that the counterculture of the 1960s had


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nurtured. Disco, with its elaborate costumes, exhibitionist focus on dance, and attendant

drug culture, represented a turning away from political challenges, a refusal to deal with

social problems, and a desire for momentary pleasures. Punk, on the other hand, was a

howl of rage from working class youth who saw, and rejected in no uncertain terms, the

hypocrisy of the social establishment and the increasing inaccessibility of economic

opportunities for the socio-economically disadvantaged. Disco was stereotypically identified

with African-American performers (albeit predominantly white consumers) whereas punk

was typed as a British phenomenon, although, in fact, both musical constituencies could be

found in any of the wealthy nations that were starting in the 1970s to wrestle with de-

industrialization, wage stagnation, and the corporate restructuring now known as

outsourcing.

Elements of both of these musical responses to social marginalization and injustice are

synthesized in hip-hop, the most popular musical form for expression of protest worldwide

in the following period. In Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary

America, sociologist Tricia Rose theorizes the hip-hop universe of her youth as emerging

from a post-industrial nightmare in which the ethnic poor were being crowded out of public

space, and creative protest was fostered in the effort to reclaim for the people the

neighborhoods that were being torn apart to build expressways into the city for affluent

suburban commuters (31-33). Into this unacknowledged war on the poor and the

marginalized came the interplay of technology, economics, and culture at the origin of hip-

hop, what Rose describes as a practice of appropriating cultural refuse for pleasure (22-23).Subways, street corners, abandoned parks were occupied by listeners and dancers as

political spaces. The elements of “flow, layering, and rupture” both reflect and contest social

marginalization, Rose says; in its origins, the music was both articulating and symbolizing

the lived experience of people struggling to hold onto a community identity in the face of

“urban development” and gentrification processes (22). The struggle, she insists, was not a

final, futile gesture of victims of urban apocalypse, but was the formation of an alternative,

communally-forged identity by producers of a conscious “take back the public spaces”

movement (Rose 33). It was an intransigent, unapologetic assertion of the right of allhuman beings to take up public space, to interact with each other and with the music that

informed these politicized, reclaimed spaces.

2. Contemporary Protest

As noted in the previous section, much of the protest of injustice that is expressed musically

in the early 21 century is done so through hip-hop. There is, for instance, a Hungarian

rapper by the name of Dopeman who performs his discontent with the political

homogenization of the country’s post-communist regime. And in Haiti, there was a

nationwide rap contest in June 2006, the “Concours Pwojè Lari Pwòp,” in which young

st


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people submitted original raps on the topic of cleaning up the environment and the nation

voted for their favorite recordings made by twelve finalists—a sort of socially conscious

“Haitian Idol” program (Yéle Haiti, 2006). But the resonance that hip-hop has for youth in

many different cultures should not blind us to the diversity of music—traditional and

improvised—through which justice appeals speak to people. For instance, Foucaultian

scholar Ladelle McWhorter opens her book Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-

America with an anecdote about attending a vigil for Matthew Shepard, the young college

student in Wyoming whose 1998 death was an anti-gay hate crime, recalling that some

attendees felt inspired to sing the Civil Rights-era anthem “We Shall Overcome” as an

expression of their stand against homophobia. The discussions in this section should

therefore be read not as a comprehensive overview, but as a selection of examples that

showcase the diversity of musical styles that are speaking justice around the world.

a. Communal and Community-based Music Making inDemocratic States

One of the most inspiring instances of music expressing the ethos to which a community

aspires can be found in the response of the Norwegian people to the shocking mass murder

committed in the summer of 2011 by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik. To the

extent that a motivation has emerged for Breivik’s actions—killing 77 people and wounding

200 more in attacks on government buildings in Oslo and a summer camp on the nearby

island of Utoeya—he seems to have been driven by a hatred of the multiculturalism Norway has embraced and by a belief that immigration—Muslim immigration, in particular—has

had a contaminating effect on society. One of the elements of Norwegian multiculturalism

that he cited as the object of his hatred was a song that is taught to children in schools,

“Children of The Rainbow.” This song is a Norwegian version of folk singer Pete Seeger’s

anti-war song “My Rainbow Race” and it embodies for many Norwegians their shared social

commitments to celebrating the diversity of human beings and to teaching their children a

similar appreciation.

One might expect a community that has been devastated by mass-murder to react with rage

and calls for harsh punishment for the perpetrator, especially given that many of his victims

were young people. One might also expect heated public debates about gun control and the

need for better early diagnosis and intervention in matters of mental health. What one

might not expect to see, but did in fact happen in April 2012, is a gathering of thousands of

people in the capital to sing both Norwegian and English versions of the song as a defiant

refusal of Breivik’s hate-fueled politics of racial purity. This community response took place

in a public square close to the courthouse in which Breivik was being tried, and some

participants spoke of their hope that he could hear their response. The larger point, though,

was to reaffirm the values of peace and love that the song represents, to reaffirm the


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community’s commitment to each other in the face of efforts to divide them and distance

them from their values.

b. Building Social Solidarity against Neo-liberalism

While the Norwegian example demonstrates the expression of shared existing values, music

also has considerable constructive power. It can bind a community or movement which is in

the process of being built to the values or ideals that are inspiring the emergent community,

a dialectical performance of communities and commitments through music. One such

example is the 2012 student protest movement in the Canadian province of Quebec. The

student protests began in March as demonstrations against an announced hike in tuition

fees at the public universities and colleges, an increase of 75% to be phased in over five

years, that would have brought Quebec’s historically much lower tuitions into line with those

paid by students in the rest of Canada. This harmonization attempt, apparently reasonable

in the eyes of many observers, struck members and representatives of Quebec’s student

unions as a violation of the social contract governing the province and a direct assault on

their stated goal of low-cost—preferably tuition-free—and accessible post-secondary

education. Students at some Montreal institutions refused to attend classes, going on strike

to demand a rollback of the announced increases. They began marching in the streets,

wearing and displaying in apartment windows or on apartment balconies the sign of the

protest, the carré rouge (a red square, usually of felt or wool).

They also began making “music,” a discordant but coordinated noise-making that was

adapted from Chilean protests against the Pinochet dictatorship. Every evening at 8pm,

people were invited to go out on their balconies and bang pots and pans in a display that was

dubbed les casseroles. The purpose of the noise-making in Chilean protests had been to

signal that the population was refusing to live in fear of the dictatorship, but in Quebec the

point was to assert membership in the community of those who believe that accessible

education is a crucial foundation of social egalitarianism. Participation in les casseroles was

not limited to protesting students; ordinary citizens took part also as a way of demonstratingtheir solidarity with the student groups in defending Quebec’s noticeably left-wing social

consensus. This sustained protest resulted in an electoral defeat for the premier of the

province in September, the historic election of the province’s first female leader, and her

announcement that the new government would cancel plans to hike tuition.

c. Confrontations with Authoritarian Regimes

Even when there is no existing or emergent solidarity, there is still a role for music in social

protests. For some time, Russian society has been treated to various improvised musical

protests against Vladimir Putin’s extra-democratic election triumphs by an all-female punk


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band known as “Pussy Riot.” These young women performed in masks and mini-dresses at

politically-inflected sites in Moscow, and recently faced arrest and a high-profile trial for

their performances. They persisted, despite initial warnings, because they have a point to

make about the threat to democracy that the Putin oligarchy represents. Most recently they

have been in prison for five months and have been sentenced to a two-year-long prison term

in a labor camp as the result of a number of impromptu performances in Moscow, in early

spring 2012. During one such performance, they took over a rooftop in Red Square opposite

a prison where dissidents are incarcerated (BBC America, GMT, 28 February 2012). The

most controversial, and the one that has most clearly motivated the charges of

“hooliganism,” was a performance in a revered Orthodox church, where they stormed the

altar and sang a “punk prayer” that called upon the Virgin Mary to assert herself as a

feminist icon and save the nation from Putin. The incarceration they face for their

performances has inspired solidarity protests outside Russian embassies in other countries,

and seems to have rattled the oligarchy to the point that Putin himself called for leniency in

sentencing on the very charges he insisted be brought against them. His public call for

mercy is widely seen as political theater, however, and the harshness of their sentence is

seen by some commentators on Russian public opinion as a possible spur to building a more

outspoken opposition to his rule.

3. Academic Attention to Music-Politics Links

For all of the time in which music has played an integral role in movements for socialprogress, it is only recently that academic theorizing has begun to take notice of these links.

The three major areas of attention to aesthetics-politics overlap are the discourse in social

aesthetics (or relational aesthetics) in cultural studies, the broadly interdisciplinary area of

improvisation theory, and the “Peace through Art” strand of peace studies. Not all of the

scholars working in these areas look primarily at questions of music, but valuable theoretical

insights are being produced.

a. Social Aesthetics

Social aesthetics starts with a consideration of the extent to which one’s membership in

community—that is, one’s social identity—shapes one’s approach to art-making and art

appreciation. This approach is exemplified by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s critical

rebuttal of Kantian aesthetics on the grounds that “taste” is not a universal trait which

identifies a single standard of artistic merit but is instead indexed to one’s class position.

Bourdieu offers a detailed, fine-grained argument for this hypothesis in his 1984 book

Distinction, which discusses the results of surveys of respondents from a cross-section of

social classes in France of the 1970s. Contrasting working class, bourgeois, and elite

preferences in entertaining, decorating, leisure activities, music, and film, Bourdieu argues


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that what we find beautiful is indeed demonstrably shaped by our class positions and

trajectories. This reveals aesthetic preferences as socially-inflected, hence political,

regardless of how natural they might seem to their bearers. The net effect of Bourdieu’s

intervention is repudiation of a universalist aesthetic hierarchy in which the cultural

preferences of the elite class are judged as better than those of the working class, in favor of

a relativist indexing of artistic productions to class positions.

While much of the research into musical tastes that explicitly engages the notion of class is

being done in the European context, it is not hard to see how this discourse asserts itself in

American accounts of taste. The concepts of “highbrow” music—Western art music, or

“classical”—and “lowbrow” music—popular, mass-marketed productions, from jazz in the

1930s to rock in the 1950s through 1980s and, most recently, hip-hop—link tastes to

education and income levels, which appear in the American lexicon as stand-ins for the

concept of class. Understanding this linguistic translation makes it possible for us to employ

a social aesthetics reading of some of the claims in the history of American musical

production that otherwise seem unmotivated. In particular, John Coltrane’s rejection of the

label “jazz” for his music, and his preference for labeling jazz “America’s classical music”

can, through this lens, be interpreted as a contestation of the class position to which jazz

musicians and their art-making had be relegated. This contestation does not achieve the

relativism of Bourdieu’s inventory, but it does underscore the connection between social

identity, or community membership, and aesthetic taste.

b. Improvisation Theory

While much of the work in social aesthetics/relational aesthetics is taking place in the

discipline of cultural studies, improvisation theory is asserting itself as a self-consciously

interdisciplinary endeavor. It draws together musicians, musicologists, philosophers,

historians, and cultural theorists, among others, to consider questions of how and why

improvisation as both a musical and social practice contributes to social organization

overall.

Another developing area is the ethics of improvisation. Tracey Nicholls argues that the

examination and adoption of the norms and values that flourish in communities of

improvising musicians—those who improvise in the “free jazz” tradition, in particular—can

help us to build more responsive, more democratic political societies. To be part of an

improvising ensemble demands an openness to others, a willingness to listen carefully,

closely, and charitably, and to respond in constructive ways that advance the musical

“conversation.” This requires capacities for self-trust and respect for others on the part of

every participant. The payoff is an expanded ability to engage difference creatively, instead

of through an attitude of fear and hostility, and this in turn leads to a greater ability to deal


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with the complexity of a fast paced, globalized world. The ideal actor, in both musical

improvisation and the sphere of grassroots popular political action, is the figure Cornel West

dubs “the jazz freedom fighter”—an individual who pits his or her creative vision and talents

against other members of a group in a way that is both competitive and collaborative. As

West puts it, “individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension

with the group—a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the

collective project” (italics in original, 150-151). In developing our capacities for openness to

difference and living with risk (that, for instance, our attempts to negotiate and

communicate might fail), this ethics of improvisation grounds subsidiary virtues that are not

otherwise encouraged by our social status quo (a way of thinking that teaches us to refrain

from taking chances if failure is a live option). Virtues like generosity towards others,

willingness to support their risk-taking and their struggles to find creative ways out of

impasses, commitment to an enhanced capacity to forgive the mis-steps that inevitably

happen in these struggles, and greater respect for the ability to integrate, adopt, or even

switch between different perspectives and different types of tools are also encouraged. This

is not to suggest that we should dispense with planning but, given that our best-laid plans

may fail, there is an enormous value to developing our individual capacities for

improvisatory action. In this way, improvisation in music points the way to more resilient

and more just societies.

c. Peace through Art

Peace through Art, in particular, social transformation effected through music, is an

approach to music and social justice that shares with improvisation theory its inter-

disciplinarity. One of the theorizers and practitioners of peace-building who not only takes

seriously the role of art and music, but also seeks to advance our understanding of it, is John

Paul Lederach whose peace-building work focuses on conflict transformation through social

healing—in particular, the question of “how sonic phenomena might be applied to contexts

of social change” (90). Lederach’s work with fractured communities emphasizes the

restoration of voice, a concept he finds particularly resonant with people who are strugglingto repair their violent communities (110, 89). What “voice”—understood both as the

individual regaining his or her voice, and the community engaging in meaningful

conversation (Lederach 109)—requires is “a container or space within which people [feel]

safe but [are] also close enough to hear and receive the echo of each other’s voices”

(Lederach 89).

The particular metaphor Lederach favors in his representations of peace processes is one

that brings together voice and container: the Tibetan singing bowl. He observes that social

healing, like musical resonance, “does not arise from the individual. It emerges from the

interaction of many vibrations, individual and collective, held within a community context.


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In other words, social healing and reconciliation emerge in and around the container that

holds collective processes” (Lederach 101). Elaborating on the bowl metaphor, Lederach

points to some of the distinguishing characteristics of the multi-directionality that the bowl

shares with sound (94). The first is circular movement: “[g]oing in circles and repeating

them over and again is not,” he insists, “… a movement of going nowhere,” but has instead “a

ritualistic quality … creating a certain kind of space and moment” (Lederach 94). The

second is the container itself: “the bowl creates the space or location from which the sound

is coaxed and held, but in terms of movement the sensation is one of going deep, made

possible by the circling” (Lederach 94). “Deepening becomes a directional focus of the

container,” says Lederach (94). The third directional characteristic that makes the bowl a

compelling metaphor is rising: “[s]ound not only seems to rise from the bowl,” he explains;

“it expands, moves out, touches and surrounds the space within its reach. Sound moves in

all directions…. sound is multi-directional and non-linear in its movement” and offers the

experience of “feelings of being touched and held” (Lederach 94).

Circling, deepening, and rising are all aspects of percussion that make instruments like

drums and the singing bowl often function as “the heartbeat” of musical performances.

They are also important aspects of the genuine, voluntary, non-imposed community

reconciliation that Lederach prefers to discuss as “conflict transformation.” Going around,

repeating over and over, is a way of gathering grassroots support within a community; each

time an outreach effort is made, space is created for community members who had

previously not been involved to join the movement. The descending movement can beunderstood as a way of describing the process of developing, through a repetition that may

well become ritualized, an emotional loyalty to something that starts out as a social

commitment—internalizing the peace-building ambition. And the rising movement can

similarly be understood as the inexorable pressure that a fully committed, mobilized

grassroots community can exert on a wider population—regional, national, or international

—a bending of the discourse to the demands of the grassroots in the same way that the

expanding, enveloping musical note arising from the bowl captures the attention of people

in the audience who may not have been giving the performance their full attention.

4. References and Further Reading

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1985.

A history of the interplay of music and political life.

Baraka, Amiri [Leroi Jones]. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Quill/William

Morrow, 1999 [1963].

A classic text in African-American cultural studies.

BBC America. GMT. 28 February 2012.

A television report on Pussy Riot performances.

Born, Georgina and David Hesmondhalgh. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation,


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and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

A collection of essays on difference and culture-crossing in global musical exchanges.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

A sociological rebuttal of philosophy of art that identifies an attitude of disinterest as the mark of aesthetic

appreciation.

“Breivik trial: Norwegians rally around peace song.” BBC News. 26 April 2012.

A news report about people’s responses to the trial.Clibbon, Jennifer. “How a student uprising is reshaping Quebec.” CBC News. 29 May 2012.

An interview with three cultural commentators on the historical context and current significance.

Daley, Mike. “Land of the free. Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock Festival, August 18, 1969.” Performance and

Popular Music: History, Place and Time. Ed. Ian Inglis. Hampshire UK: Ashgate, 2006. 52-57.

An essay on how this iconic performance shaped the development of popular music.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New

York: Oxford UP, 1988.

A scholarly survey of the culturally-distinct communicative practices shaping African-American artistic

production.

Kofsky, Frank. Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. New York: Pathfinder, 1970.

A history of the free jazz movement of the 1960s and its socio-political commitments.

Lederach, John Paul and Angela Jill Lederach. When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the

Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

An account of peace-building in conflict zones through local musical traditions.

Margolick, David. “Strange Fruit.” Vanity Fair Magazine, September 1998.

A journalistic account of the history of the Billie Holliday song.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1996.

A musician and music theorist’s account of the transformative effects of music.

“Moscou: les trois Pussy Riot condamnées à deux ans de prison chacune.” métro. 17 August 2012.

An Associated Press story in a Montréal free daily newspaper.

Murray, Albert. Stomping The Blues. Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 1976.

An analysis of the aesthetic merits of jazz and blues music on their own terms.

Nicholls, Tracey. An Ethics of Improvisation: Aesthetic Possibilities for a Political Future. Lanham MD:

Lexington, 2012.

An argument for the transferability of norms shaping improvising musicians’ communities to political

communities, and their transformative possibilities.

Pratt, Ray. Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music. New York:Praeger, 1990.

A study of the political uses of popular music by marginalized communities.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown CT:

Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

An exploration of the history, aesthetics, and political commitments of hip-hop culture, with an emphasis on

its musical production.

“Strange Fruit.” Independent Lens.

A Public Broadcasting System (PBS) documentary exploring the origins and impact of Billie Holiday’s most

famous song.

Yéle Haiti Foundation, 2006.The grassroots social rebuilding movement organized by Haitian-American rapper Wyclef Jean.


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Author Information

Tracey Nicholls

Email: [email protected]

Lewis University

U. S. A.
mailto:[email protected]

Documents

Music and Social Justice _ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy