Music and Social Activism

This paper puts recent scholarship on sound and violence, sound studies work on emplacement, and emerging work on sonic care ethics in conversation with Marxist political philosophy and activist-scholarship in public health, environmental justice, and racial equity to envision a path towards sonic justice and just sound policies in the United States. It will ask what is an equitable "sonic good life," and how might musicologists (those with relative personal and institutional privilege inherited from and often affirming white settler colonialism) support frontline communities in their quest for a sonic good life?

This project is borne from the knowledge that the good life does not arise from negative freedom alone: the absence of violence is not peace, the lack of injury is not care. Likewise, lack of sound annoyance or violence is not synonymous with a sonic good life. Instead, real freedom, as political philosopher Philippe Van Parijs has written, would ensure equitable distribution of access to resources or capacities for one's needs and desires. By putting Van Parijs' work in dialog with our field(s), we can work towards an idea of real freedom in sound.

In the past few decades, music scholars have focused on histories, cultural studies, and ethnographic accounts of sound and violence, all of which provide useful diagnostics of sound annoyance and injuries from which to make claims for repair. In his field changing work Just Vibrations, Will Cheng moved beyond the diagnosis of the how, what, when, and why of sound violences and began a conversation about sonic care ethics, which he called "reparative acoustemology." This neologism brings together Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's call for a queer feminist scholarly praxis with a quarter century of anthropology and sound studies work on sound in/as environment, embodiment, and emplacement and brought activist-musicology into the present moment.

The next step in this work is to move from Cheng's focus on personal microremedies towards larger domains of public intervention on sound injury and towards an equitable sonic good life. In this paper I will uplift stories of frontline communities who experience sound violence "first and worst" in order to diagnosis, discuss, and work towards policy choices that would create a positive freedom in each study. In the United States, these are communities of color and low-income communities whose environments involve over-crowded living conditions, over-policing, proximity to industrial and state facilities, and lack of access to green, healthy and/or natural spaces. By looking at case studies of the environmental and racial equities movements, who have successfully moved towards centering frontline affected communities both as leaders of movements and as policy makers for just change, I will trace the possibilities for musicologists in coalition, companionship, and support of frontline communities in their struggles for a sonic good life within larger systems of just social transformation.

Through a regular commissioning program, gay choruses contribute a large amount of new music to the choral repertoire. New songs and multi-movement works are vital to outreach in that they allow choruses to make commentary on relevant issues impacting LGBTQ+ people. For this very reason, the repertoire of newly commissioned music is ancillary to choruses' approaches to activism. This body of music functions as a text, documenting painful aspects of LGBTQ+ history – the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, the AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s and up through medical advancements, the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, countless instances of suicide among LGBTQ+ youth because of bullying, and more. New music speaks to chorus singers' individual and shared experiences, often in profoundly personal ways. Consequently, some singers often consider dropping out of a concert cycle containing new music that might hit too close to home, so to speak. Drawing from research interviews and fieldwork, this paper first looks at instances where singers overcame ambivalence about such music and took part in performance because of a felt obligation to their chorus. Then, drawing from these interviews (with singers, conductors, and administrative staff of these choruses), this paper will examine the role of this music in shaping the perceptions of singers on their work as agents of social change. In relation to this, questions arise as to which pieces of new music continue to be performed by choruses, and which have been abandoned (mainly due to perceptions of continued relevance), and why. The ways in which new music contends with pain and trauma in LGBTQ+ history, informing community music-making driven by activism, carries strong implications for musicological research.

Since the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the artistic response has revealed the complexity with which the disease and its sufferers were perceived by communities both inside and outside the plague's circle. One of the largest and earliest to do so was a Requiem Mass premiered in May 1989 by Kansas City composer Christopher Lacy and performed by the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra with massed community and church choirs. Modeled after Britten's _War Requiem_, Lacy's work intersperses Latin texts with poetry by Thomas Wolfe in eight movements. While not the first work written in response to the AIDS crisis, it was by far the most ambitious up to that point, anticipating, for example, John Corigliano's Symphony Number One by a year. Through the efforts of several prominent Kansas City society women, the performance succeeded in raising nearly $100,000 for a local AIDS Hospice.


In this paper, I examine the position of Lacy's Requiem within the history of music and AIDS. Like many gay children raised in isolated surroundings, Lacy sought refuge in the fantasy and "elevated" world of opera and classical music. Rather than explicitly attempting anything political or modernist in his Requiem, he depicts rage, sorrow, and agony through a postmodern mélange of irony and sincerity. Significantly, Lacy incorporated a variation of the "Adagietto" from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, but as a reference to Visconti's use of the music in his adaptation of _Death in Venice_ (1970). Aschenbach's cholera, as depicted in the film, had been romanticized by some gay men in the 1970s for idealizing a devotion to beauty without moralizing judgement. That this same plague could be understood as a metaphor for AIDS in the 1980s was not lost on those same gay men. Lacy's unapologetic "borrowings" can be understood, ironically, as an insertion of his own complex experiences with the disease. His Requiem issued a challenge to the city's cultural elite, bridging the gulf between communities; on the one hand, Lacy's work nostalgically evoked an accessible, discarded musical language, on the other, a cry of mourning for an emerging gay culture profoundly altered by unimaginable loss.