The Politics of Vibration: Music as a Cosmopolitical Practice

by Marcus Boon

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478018391
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/31/2022
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

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.

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

What People are Saying About This

Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem - Benjamin Piekut

“Marcus Boon models the perfect combination of rigor and imagination. In this daring and original book, he approaches vibration through mathematics, physics, and psychoanalysis to articulate an ontology of music based on space over time, frequency over duration, instantaneity over progression. The ease with which Boon pursues his ideas across experimental music, Indian classical singing, and recent hip-hop flashes an exciting glimmer of one future for music studies. With The Politics of Vibration, we are already there.”

Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing - Julian Henriques

“Vibrations change your life; vibrations make life. Marcus Boon explores the hidden practices of vibrations for an original and fascinating insight into the nature of musical experience. In a uniquely sensitive manner—personal and political and philosophical at the same time—he weaves his way through the pulsating energies of Indian classical singing, drone music, minimalist avant-garde, and chopped and screwed hip hop. Boon gives equal attention to the big names and the little known, as they meet in cosmopolitics between the global South and North.”

Editorial 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. . . ."

The Wire - Dan Barrow

"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" (9/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"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."

Journal of Sonic Studies - Cat Hope