musicandjustice.com
Description: William Cheng is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, leading research and courses in history, media, ethics, disability, race and video games.
Can music feel pain? Do songs possess dignity? Do symphonies have rights? Of course not, you might say. Yet think of how we anthropomorphize music, not least when we believe it has been somehow mistreated. A singer butchered or mangled the "Star-Spangled Banner" at the Super Bowl. An underrehearsed cover band made a mockery of Led Zeppelin's classics. An orchestra didn't quite do justice to Mozart's Requiem. Such lively language upholds music as a sentient companion susceptible to injury and in need of fier
And there isn’t anything wrong with the human instinct to safeguard beloved music . . . except, perhaps, when this instinct leads us to hurt or neglect fellow human beings in turn: say, by heaping outsized shame upon those who seem to do music wrong; or by rushing to defend a conductor's beautiful recordings while failing to defend the multiple victims who have accused this maestro of sexual assault. Loving Music Till It Hurts is a capacious exploration of how people's head-over-heels attachments to music c
A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age (coedited by William Cheng and Danielle Fosler-Lussier) covers 1920 to the present – an era of unprecedented global conflict, transnational diplomacy, intercultural influence, ecological crisis, technological innovation, and collaborative experiments among artists. No single or clear-cut narrative can accommodate the complex power, scope, and definition of Western Music during this period. From the disciplinary systems of the Suzuki Method to the esoteri
musicandjustice.com