Academic Theory behind the Harper Project

To avoid repeating Cathryn’s May 27^th post verbatim, I thought I would detail some of the academic inspiration behind our music research and share some of my own preliminary observations. The relationship of music to the individual is a focus of multiple notable studies in ethnography. Some of these, including Michael Bull’s Sounding out the City and Shuhei Hosokawa’s “Walkman Effect,” explore the direct impact of modern day technology and portable music systems on the human being and his surroundings. Others, such as Tia DeNora’s Music in Everyday Life and Simon Frith’s Sound Effects, adopt a more comprehensive approach to the subject, investing the role that musical genre and setting plays in our conscience selves and in politics.

Central to these investigations is the dichotomy between the individual and the social needs. What is an individual, even, and how does he or she emerge within a community of unified peoples? How, moreover, does society influence the individual’s feelings, passions, and identity?

Samuel Araújo explores the impact of the bolero as a Brazilian musical form in his paper entitled “The Politics of Passion.” The bolero, a slower, introverted dance-form that is often listened to alone, differs strikingly with traditional Brazilian popular music and thereby gives rise to significant questions regarding sentimentality, nationality, and freedom. Araújo writes:

“…as the primary individual feelings and recollections evoked or aroused by boleros may never be truly socializable, they concomitantly  build refuges for radical subjectivity, ever more dependent on a virtual sense of place and time (music’s favorite function), where love, passion, pain and pleasure - all subjective states irreducible to rational measuring and control - may be cultivated away from shame or censorship…In this process, the imprints of radical subjectivity - men’s and women’s self-perception as disenfranchised beings - will always leave open…possibilities of meaning formation that may  not otherwise be available” (55).

We see here that the individual experiences the bolero to the fullest in his or her personal time and space. Yet, as the musical form captures the imagination of the Brazilian lower and middle class, it has been nationalized. The bolero at once represents the individual’s intrinsic desire to feel the deepest human sentiments and to be valued in light of them as a part of the greater human community. It has reached so many individuals that, unintentionally, this introspective music has become an image for Brazilian culture as a whole.

Might the quiet nature of the bolero have implications for social justice on the part of the individual? Certainly, its listener transports him or herself to an ideal setting where neither shame nor censorship exists and where he or she escapes from ethnic, religious, and cultural norms.

Our modern music technology makes this process quite easy. Hosokwa begins his 1984 article on the walkman effect by contradicting thinkers who suggest that portable music devices drive alienation, self-enclosure, political apathy, and incommunicability. The walkman does not dehumanize its carrier; rather, the device “is the autonomy-of-the-walking-self” (166), forming the individual’s own very relevant reality (171). Hosokwa guides us through the layers of musica mobilis, which begins with the simple tones of of bustling urban life, becomes more prominent with street musicians, and more exclusive with car stereos and cassettes (166-168). These layers involve music that humans participate in together. The walkman listener, by contrast, seeks to achieve perfection in his or her personal zone of listening (167). Hosokwa concludes that the walkman is a “secret theatre” (177). He writes:

“[The user] listens not only to something secret but also to the secret itself, a secret in the form of mobile sound: an open, public secret…He lets people know that he is listening to a secret. He neither refuses communication nor is isolated from reality, but continues enunciating the existence of his secret in this simple way. He lets people know voluntarily that he has the truth which, nevertheless, does not appear” (177).

The secret-holder, then, has power over the secret-beholder.

I believe very much that the clandestine nature of personal music systems is what sparked my curiosity regarding the hidden music of the University of Chicago. I am of course attuned to the musical genres that I myself enjoy in my quiet time, but as of last Monday have been kept from the musical “secrets” of my peers. I chose Harper library as the central location for our study because the reading room buzzes with silence. It is the place where students are most quiet, most secretive, and where I feel most blinded from each individual’s musical truth. By engaging with the visitors here, I can explore the soundscape of silence and hear the music beneath it, which will, I hope, unveil truths about the human individual as he or she straddles the private and public space.  

- Ingrid Watts

Araújo, Samuel. “The Politics of Passion: The Impact of Bolero on Brazilian Musical Expressions.” Yearbook for Traditional Music, Vol. 31. International Council for Traditional Music, 1999. 42-56. Print.

Bull, Michael. Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000. Print. 

DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.

Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Pantheon, 1981. Print.

Hosokawa, Shuhei. “The Walkman Effect.” Popular Music, Vol. 4: Performers and Audiences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 165-180. Print.