Listening to the A. D. White House: Cornell’s Society for the Humanities’ Year in Review

Today, Society for the Humanities Director Timothy Murray sings us back home with a meditation on the soundscapes of study at the A.D. White House this year, closing out our spring “Live from the SHC” series covering new research on “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics.” The 2011-2012 Fellows have got to say goodbye for the summer–and sadly beyond–but we all hope that next years’ Fellows (2012-2013 Theme: Risk @ Humanities) enjoy all the good vibrations we will leave behind, and that you, Dear SO! readers, have enjoyed our broadcast! Our summer series, “Tuning In the Past,” on radio and legacy of broadcaster Norman Corwin, featuring Neil Verma, Shawn VanCour, and Alex Russo begins at the end of June. And, of course, every Monday in between and beyond, we’ll keep giving you something you can feel. –JSA, Editor in Chief (and 2011-2012 SHC Fellow)
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Many thanks to Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman for hosting “Live from the SHC” on Sounding Out! What a fantastic experience it’s been to have Jennifer screening and tweaking Sounding Out! from her garret office overlooking the gardens behind the A.D. White House, the Cornell home of the Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. Readers of “Live from the SHC” have read various strains of this year’s focal theme, “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics.” The aim of this year’s residential research project was to contemplate and analyze the resonance of historical and contemporary representations, movements, ideas, and negations of sound.

From Left: Tim Murray, Eric Lott, Tom McEnaney, and Marcus Boon, Image by Renate Ferro
Open to study of the broadest cross-cultural range of contexts and media that cross the boundaries of time and space–from East and West/South and North–the Fellows’ research delved into the complex ways that sound abounds in visual, textual, and aural realms. From “voicing” to “listening,” sound shaped the framework of our critical and philosophical analyses of the body, affect, and social publics. Sound came to be appreciated for its shaping of the parameters of psycho-cultural imaginaries, social practice, religious ritual, and political regulation throughout history and across the globe. Just as sound differs in the global context of capitalism and cosmopolitanism, not to mention the specificities of ethnic difference and cultural diversity, “voice,” “hearing,” and “listening” frame the humanities disciplines in relation to their aesthetic properties and political ramifications.

From Left: Eric Lott and Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Image by Jeanette Jouili
The Fellows found themselves reflecting on several key issues. Which criteria differentiates natural from artificial sounds? Does sound challenge disciplinary distinctions between the visual and the oral/aural/tactile? Can the loud noises of industrial culture be distinguished from the synthetic sounds of electronic music, the stammerings of performance and the vibrations of philosophical manifestos? It should come as no surprise to followers of Sounding Out! that sound marks the passage of time, the correlation of the aural to the movement of the body in dance and performance, the sonic promise of cartographic projects of social movements and migrations, and the cultural and ethnic specificities of acoustic fields and rhythms in the age of sampling and mixing, not to mention the gender, racial, and ethnic import of voice and spoken narrative.
Adding vibrant texture to our year-long discussions were the three weeks spent in extended dialogue with the Society’s Senior Invited Fellows. Emily Thompson (The Soundscape of Modernity) charted the histories of the architectonic sounds of cinema houses as well as the untraceable wealth of the historical sounds of New York City as its peripheries morphed from country estate to urban zone. Brandon LaBelle came from Norway to take us on a journey of artistic imagination and phenomenological hopefulness as he cruised his writings on Acoustic Territories and Site Specific Sound while sampling the background noises of his multimedia installations. Then Norie Neumark, fresh off the release of VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media (co-edited with Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leewen), arrived from Australia to follow up on our 2003 online seminar on Sound Cultures. She reminded us of the deep history of sound studies down under, while focusing our attention on voicings and her own multimedia art practice that blends spoken narrative, synthetic noise, mouthed breath, and shocks in the ear. [The “Live From the SHC” logo is a piece from Neumark and Maria Miranda’s “Shock in the Ear”–ED].
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Various other visitors throughout the year included multimedia artists Mendi and Keith Obadike whose “not” Afrofuturism walked us through their exciting series of performance works,“Four Electric Ghosts,” Caitlin Marshall from Berkeley who brought cyborg speech to life with her prosthetic soundings, and renowned choreographer William Forsythe, whose four-hour choreography piece “Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time“–performed amidst amidst over 150 hanging pendulums–combined dance and environment as a means of physically manifesting the process of thought. Marjorie Garber from Harvard rode our acoustic wave to reflect on the future of the humanities while Norma Coates came down from Western Ontario to sensitize us to the mixes of pop sound and culture.

Brock Labrenz performs William Forsythe’s “Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time” at Cornell University’s Rand Hall on March 3, 2012. Image by William Staffeld / AAP
In listening back to the echoes of the year past, rather than here retracing the specific projects of our Fellows (you can consult the critical tales already Sound[ed] Out! by Damien Keane, Tom McEnaney, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Jonathan Skinner, Eric Lott, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, and Jeanette Jouili), I find myself sampling the sounds, noises, and glitches that provided unexpected reverbs for the academic writing happening behind closed office doors throughout the A. D. White House.

Nina Sun Eidsheim, Image by Renate Ferro
Sounds of glee, delight, and play first arrived on the scene at the end of August with gaggles of laughing and screaming kids running wild and climbing trees in the gardens, surrounded by bemused adults and envious dogs. Accompanying partners brought to the mix the diverse soundings of African film, suspicious packages, software beats, performance art, critical geography, and real estate hawking. No wonder the assembled Fellows strayed so readily, if not unconventionally, from the promised strictures of already exceptional research projects that brought to our weekly seminar table the street sounds of Egypt, Turkey, Korea, early modern Germany, contemporary Islam, American hip hop, contemporary art, circuit bending, gaming, German, Irish, U.S. and Latin American radio, voices of performers, animals, and posthumans, urban soundscapes, and, here making a loud call out to one Stoever-Ackerman, sonic color-lines.

Marcus Boon Rocks the Spring Workshop After Party–Image by JSA
Resounding throughout the year to give cadence and timbre to our serious ponderings were the spontaneous soundings that seemed always to give ample depth to the provocative interstices of intellectual life. There were the noises of glitch, circuit-bending, and Guitar Hero that stretched and extended the purpose of music and machinics. There were spontaneous voice lessons that turned anxious performers into wild choreographic objects. Singing above in the hidden alcoves–when not streaming through the high Victorian ceilings of the A. D. White House–were our flying mammal friends whose echolocation extended beyond the reach of our mere human ears. Then were the sudden noisy reminders of the vulnerability of our corporeal organs. Who could forget the reported imaginary of the crunch of human leg against car as two of our Fellows found themselves under assault from a crazed pizza delivery guy – luckily no lasting damage?
Our fellows will carry away the subliminal lacings of the lighter sounds of improvisation and camaraderie. There were the poundings of feet and slappings of bodies dancing late into the night after hours of laborious conferencing to the beats of DJs Marcus Boon, Art Jones, and Earmuffs.
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At the end of the year, Fellows grooved to the beat of Tom McEnaney playing bass with The Vix Krater out at the Rongo in Trumansburg, NY (down the road from the home of Moog), before retreating to the bowels of the A. D. White House basement for another dusty, late night jam session with drums, synthesizer, guitars, bass, and various acoustics, led by the ultimate sound blogger herself, the guitar heroesse, Jenny S-A. [Well, I’m learning. So far I know E-Minor. It was Trevor that really broke my strings in! –ED].

(From left) Damien Keane on bass, Michael Jonik, Trevor Pinch on Guitar and Moog, Image by JSA
And, yes, there was always the accompaniment of the clinks of glasses and bottles bearing the liquid life blood of any noisy crew.
The French philososopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, reminds us in Listening (2007) that the shared space of noise and sound entails “a totality of referrals: from a sign to a thing, from a state of things to a quality, from a subject to another subject or to itself, all simultaneously. Sound is also made of referrals: it spreads in space, where it resounds while still resounding ‘in me'” (7). What resounded and referred this year at the Society for the Humanities was the very immaterial and inchoate touch of sound, which is a-live in intensity and force. But who would have imagined the intensity of the noise of referral that remained so constant throughout the year to envelop the solid academic work of our Fellows in the wilding vibrations of jouissance? Indeed, perhaps the best lesson of the year, at a moment when the humanities finds itself threatened and in transition by the supposed certainty of metric and assessment, is that the Society’s scholarship in sound was driven by the relentless noise of referral and the unpredictable delight of the commune.

From Left: Renate Ferro, Ladi Dell’aira, Sarah Ensor, Jeanette Jouili, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Brian Hanrahan, and Norie Neumark, Image by JSA
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Featured Image Credit: Brandon La Belle, Duck Duck Goose Installation, Ausland, Berlin
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Timothy Murray is Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. He is the Cornell Principal Investigator of the Central Humanities Corridor, generously supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and he sits on the International Advisory Board of the Consortium of the Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and the Steering Committee of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). He is Co-Moderator of the –empyre- new media listserv and the author of Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota 2008); Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-ROM (Centro de la imagen, 1999); Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997); Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993); Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987). He is editor of Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997) and, with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1997). His curatorial projects include CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA and Contact Zones: The Art of the CD-Rom.
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- in Soundscapes, Music, Listening, Voice, Theory/criticism, Sound, Place and Space, Diasporic Sound, Sound Studies, Hip Hop, Aesthetics, Politics, The Body, Performance, Authenticities, Religion and Religious Studies, Live from the SHC, Popular Music Studies, Islam/Muslim Identity, Caribbean Studies, Article
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Beat-ification: British Muslim Hip Hop and Ethical Listening Practices

As the beat drops for our latest Live from the SHC post, Cornell’s Society for the Humanities Fellow Jeanette Jouili hits us with some (social) science, sharing her ethnographic research on Muslim Hip Hop in pious communities in Britain. To give earlier installments by Damien Keane, Tom McEnaney, Jonathan Skinner, and Eric Lott another spin, click here. Next week, the needle comes to the end of the groove for the “Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics” crew as Society Director Tim Murray takes us on home. Good thing Sounding Out! can’t stop, won’t stop. . . –JSA, Editor in Chief (and 2011-2012 SHC Fellow)
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Can Hip Hop sound Islamic? And conversely, can one listen to Hip Hop in a Muslim way? What is at stake when a contemporary musical form like Hip hop (or rock or punk) is introduced into the catalogue of recognized Islamic music genres? What impact do these genres have on longstanding Islamic traditions of ethical listening? In the process of creating new genres of Islamic music, which have not been previously connected to Muslim music traditions, norms are negotiated, border zones are walked upon, limits explored. At the same time, these Islamic music practitioners, even those who push established artistic limits within the Islamic movement, nevertheless intend to uphold the initial ethical project.
Considering music as producing sensual pleasure or extreme emotional excitement, Muslim scholars throughout the ages have been concerned with its capacity to hinder the exercise of reason and self-mastery as well as with its promises for spiritual benefit. Roughly, one can say that those who have opposed the practice of listening to music feared that music’s force arouses worldly passions which distract from the remembrance of God, whereas those who were favourable toward this practice – generally speaking these voices came from thinkers and practitioners of the Islamic mystical traditions –highlighted music’s capacity to impel the believer to seek the spiritual world while simultaneously being attentive to its potential dangers. Among these two sides, there is a wide range of theological opinions, from those that prohibit any kind of musical singing (considering Qu’ran recitation and poetry recitation not in terms of the category music) as well as all musical instruments, to those that allow for singing and certain musical instruments (i.e. drums permitted, stroke instruments not), and those who allow for all the array of musical expressions (given that specific moral conditions are fulfilled).
If the evolution of Islamic music toward the incorporation of modern music traditions has already been controversial within many Islamic revival contexts, it is not exaggerated to claim that Hip hop, at least in the UK, is probably the most contested and is until now the most marginalized of the different music genres within the Islamic popular culture scene. Today’s British Muslim Hip Hop is an occasion to think about the struggles of young Muslims to incorporate a music tradition that epitomizes black music culture like no other contemporary genre into the larger frame of Islamic music in Britain, which has been largely associated with South Asian and Middle Eastern music traditions.

Rakin and Ismael of Hip Hop Duo Mecca 2 Medina, Image Courtesy of M2M
Muslim Hip Hop takes many different sonic and stylistic directions in the UK. Some artists advance their Muslim identity in the context of religion and others take a more political standpoint; many blend both to varying degrees. What connects these diverse orientations is the critique of contemporary mainstream commercial Hip Hop. Many Muslim Hip Hop fans and artists see this music as little more than a glorification of materialism and sexism. The thriving Muslim Hip Hop scene in the UK, which is deeply influenced by Afro-Caribbean converts to Islam, clearly situates itself in continuity with early Hip Hop, as defined by black awareness, political messages, and an underlying Islamic identity. Their own engagement in Islamic Hip hop is thus seen as holding true to the ‘authentic’ Hip hop traditions by purifying a corrupted Hip hop and renewing and reconnecting it to its Islamic identity.
While Aki Nawaz’ FUN-DA-MENTAL were Muslim Hip Hop pioneers in early nineties British hip hop, it was notably Mecca 2 Medina which opened the doors for Muslim rappers in the reticent U.K. Muslim community. Currently, the Mozambique-born rapper Mohammed Yahya, the female rap duo Poetic Pilgrimage, the sisters from Pearls of Islam, Muslim Belal, and Rakin Niass (formerly of Mecca 2 Medina) headline many urban Muslim cultural events in Britain. Lowkey and Jaja Soze are two well-established names in the UK Hip hop scene who are also present within the more subcultural Muslim scene.

Lowkey, Image by Flickr User The Girl 78
The Islamic Hip hop scene in Great Britain struggles to find a way to bring the tradition of Hip Hop in line with Islamic traditions, molding it to conform to Islam’s ethics of listening and sonic practices. Hip Hop can be especially problematic (from a certain Islamic point of view) because danceability is usually one of its prime objectives. The sensual dance style instigated by Hip Hop is notably achieved through amplified bass and repetitive beats that often drown the vocals. British Muslim Hip hop artists emphasize, however, that it is not so much the beats, but the spoken word art that connects Hip Hop to the sonic-linguistic practices of Islam’s pronounced oral tradition. A minority of rappers (for instance, Muslim Belal) adhere to a specific Islamic interpretation according to which music instruments are forbidden, and therefore use no instrumentals, only human voices as background music. But the large majority of Muslim artists, including those who are outspokenly religious, do use instrumentation. Yet, a fine line seems to exist where beats begin transmuting into “nightclub” sounds. While neither clearly defined, nor necessarily articulated by the artists themselves, Muslim artists nonetheless avoid this musical point of no return so as not to marginalize the spoken word. Jaja Soze’s “Just Like Me” is a good example of such sonic practice. Soze plans to do exclusively spoken word in the future.
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Notably, according many Muslim Hip Hop artists in the UK, Hip Hop invokes important similarities with forms of recited or sung poetry, practices which were so cherished in the early Islamic community. For all these artists, reconciling Islam with Hip hop means recentering the spoken art form by sonically emphasizing the voice and the words. Thus, Islamic Hip hop is stylistically related to spoken word poetry, which frequently critiques the camouflaging of Hip hop lyrics behind beats. The lyrical content is also reflective of an Islamic ethic, often weaving explicitly pious Islamic themes with politically and socially conscious lyrics. Racism, Islamophobia, Neo-Liberalism and Imperialism in the age of the Global War on Terror are constant themes, as are critiques of the gang violence faced by minority communities in England’s major cities and cultural practices connected to the countries of origins of Muslim immigrants. “Silence is Consent,” from Poetic Pilgrimage, a female Hip Hop and Spoken Word duo and one of the few Muslim female Hip Hop artists in the UK highlights such socially conscious lyrics.
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Lowkey’s lyrics in “Terrorist?” are an especially strident critique of the War on Terror:
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Far from constituting a vital unit with the lyrics (as is otherwise commonly assumed for Hip hop), beats and musical instrumentation are often treated as dispensable in Muslim Hip Hop. Even the artists who use instrumentation regularly perform their pieces a cappella on events that do not allow music instruments; many artists even offer their CDs in two versions: one with and one without instrumentation. Also, many artists switch easily from spoken poetry to Hip hop (the same lyrics can be performed, depending on the demands, as a spoken word or a Hip hop/rap piece), as they consider spoken poetry to be an intrinsic part of the broader Hip hop culture.
Such considerations are in line with Islamic traditions of listening, with their strong concern for listening to the voice and to the word. Listening to voices and words that carry spiritual and sacred contents or disseminate more broadly positive messages is reasoned through the paradigmatic experience of Qur’an recitation. The invocation of “beautification” (translated literally from the Arabic term tajweed, which refers to Qur’an recitation) has become a common trope among the British Muslim Hip Hop artists I have interviewed in order to defend their artistic activity (whether pertaining to voice and instruments or only to their vocal skills). As in Quran recitation, “beautification” is employed here as a tool to facilitate the reception and to reinforce the affective impact of the word. “Clarity” by Rakin Niass, who started rapping with the British rap group Cash Crew and is one of the founding members of Mecca 2 Medina, clearly promotes a moral life style.
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Hip hop, if it wants to be considered legitimate within an Islamic context, must enable an ethical listening. Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape (2006) argues that listening in Islamic traditions, is “not a spontaneous and passive receptivity but a particular kind of action itself, a listening that is a doing” (34). It represents a form of active listening that involves both the intellect and the senses, promoting a specific way of being in the world. Consequently, I consider contemporary genres like Muslim Hip Hop, however modernized it might sound, does still bear the imprint of earlier da’wa traditions, encouraging an virtuous life for listeners, and cultivating necessary ethical and political sensibilities through the ear.
These new musical styles are not only reflective of new sensibilities and subjectivities, they are, as notes Jean-Luc Nancy in Listening (2007), productive of subjectivity. It is for this reasoning that one should not underestimate the significance of the evolving music genres within the Islamic revival movement. Listening carefully to them will therefore provide crucial keys for understanding the possibilities for the development of specific ethical projects within a global mass culture.
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Featured Image Credit: Poetic Pilgrimage, B Supreme 2011 © 2011 Paul Hampartsoumian
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Jeanette S. Jouili is a 2011-2012 fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. She has also held a Postdoctoral position at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at Amsterdam University where she did research on the (pious) Islamic cultural and artistic scene in France and the UK. In 2007, she received her PhD jointly from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (France) and the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (Germany). Jeanette has published in various journals including Feminist Review, Social Anthropology, and Muslim World. She is currently completing a book manuscript based on the material of her PhD dissertation provisionally titled Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in France and Germany. Jeanette’s research and teaching interests include Islam in Europe, Islamic revivalism, secularism, pluralism, popular culture, moral and aesthetic practices, and gender.
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