CHAPTER 4

Omniaudience and the History of the Good Listener: William Crotch’s Specimens of Various Styles of Music (1807)

Nicholas Mathew

The liberal ethic of listening is the other side of the liberal ethic of voice. Here’s what I mean by this: If having a voice means having agency, autonomy, and personhood, then listening is what the best subjects or institutions must do as soon as a voice pipes up.1 Listening helps to secure a functioning politics of recognition—the receptiveness and close attention that, as Charles Taylor says in his now classic essay on the subject, is “not just a courtesy we owe people,” but “a vital human need.”2

Enter the phrase “we are listening to your voices” into a search engine and you’ll turn up countless hits: announcements from local and national governments, press releases from lobby groups and corporations, solidarity statements from academic bodies and university departments, credos from unions and activist organizations. Taken together, these institutions clearly express one of the foundational contradictions that structures popular philosophies of listening: Attentive listening maximizes productivity, even as it models a humanizing resistance to such instrumental ways of thinking. This contradiction was apparent in the business literature on listening as early as 1957, when Ralph Nichols and Leonard Stevens complained in the pages of the Harvard Business Review that “people in general do not know how to listen.” Their conclusion was nakedly instrumentalizing: “The improvement of listening can be of great value in today’s business.”3 Nearly sixty years later, the UK-based think tank INTRAC and two English universities inaugurated a multiyear research collaboration entitled The Listening Zones of NGOs with much the same premise as Nichols and Stevens: The power of listening (so the project claimed) has been untapped—although, in this case, the goal was a mutually enriching form of intercultural cooperation. Listening “is key to the effectiveness of partnerships, programmes and ultimately to challenging the very power dynamics that are at the root of poverty and marginalisation,” asserted Vicky Brehm, one of the project’s research associates.4 She thus implied that receptive listening not only promotes more functional institutional relationships, but an institution’s heightened attention might even remedy the most intractable problems of wealth distribution and economic exploitation.

Claims like these—which are everywhere nowadays—infuse political rhetoric with the language of popular therapeutic practice, where being heard has for some time been the other side of talking cures.5 M. Scott Peck, the high priest of modern couples counseling and author of the 1978 bestseller The Road Less Traveled, built his career on the concept of “true listening”—a technique of profound other-directedness that promised nothing less than the “unification of speaker and listener.” “Listening is by far the most important form of attention” in any loving relationship, he insisted.6 The idea that listening is an unending moral labor—what Peck called “the work of attention”—and the related view that people have become indolent and inattentive have since pervaded the genre of self help, from Madelyn Burley-Allen’s Listening: The Forgotten Skill to Michael Nichols’s The Lost Art of Listening.7 People, it seems, have always just forgotten how to listen. The newest TED-talk-ish interventions on political dialogue, such as Celeste Headlee’s 2017 We Need to Talk and Nihal Arthanayake’s 2022 Let’s Talk, explicitly mix political and therapeutic conceptions of auditory attention, especially in response to the age of culture wars and polarization, not to mention the regular public shamings, social media pile-ons, and twitterstorms of Web 2.0.8

These competing yet related conceptions of attentive listening may appear to stand at a metaphorical remove from the kinds of listening that musicians, music teachers, and music scholars have historically cultivated and theorized. Yet, as James Davies, Martha Feldman, and others have shown with respect to the concept of voice, the figurative voices of the liberal political imaginary have never been wholly separable from the voices that musicians and music lovers embody and enjoy.9 In the 1980s and 1990s, opera critics were quick to hear the voice of the prima donna as a source of liberation, even amid the kind of ritual narrative “undoing” denounced by feminists such as Catherine Clément.10 Women in opera “sing with an authority equal to that of their male oppressors,” wrote Paul Robinson in 1989; “while the operatic text tells the story of woman’s undoing, the music tells just the opposite story: of her empowerment.”11 Around the same time, many scholars of race were theorizing the radical grain of the voice in twentieth-century popular music. The Black voice, argued Lindon Barrett, complicated the European division of “singing” and “signing,” and so helped to subvert the exploitative value forms of advanced capitalism.12

Similar continuities between the figurative and the fleshly suffuse scholarly theories of listening. One prominent strand within these theories originates in the postwar Euro-American avant garde, in particular John Cage’s belief in a pervasively sounding world, to which the artist should listen with an unprejudiced ear—a heightened attention to the sonic “inner life” of all things.13 This belief, which Douglas Kahn has called “panaurality,” gathered ethical urgency in its subsequent experimentalist iterations, not least in Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy of “deep listening”—“a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible,” as she described it.14 According to its present-day advocates at the Center for Deep Listening in Troy, New York, deep listening “promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth.”15 Oliveros’s vertical axis of aural inclusivity in turn inspired the horizontal one of Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson’s experimentalist handbook Hearing Studies, developed in one of Oliveros’s seminars at the University of California, San Diego. The manifesto consists of exercises to encourage “extended listening”—the other side of “extended technique” in musical performance, perhaps. Like “deep listening” advocates, Lockwood and Anderson promise to nurture a scattered range of personal and political virtues: “Extended listening,” they argue, is “an extension of one’s aural vocabulary [that] brings with it an awareness of the different purposes of different musics, and is valuable personally within the context of our current culture.”16 You might have noticed by now that the ethical position-taking of most listening theories is typically signaled by pairing the word listening with an urgent adjective. True listening (Peck), deep listening (Oliveros), extended listening (Lockwood and Anderson): Listening is always less than it could be and could always include more.

Musicologists have tended to be less brazen than self-publicizing sound artists or self-help gurus in advertising the ethical merits of their listening habits. Still, the idea that attentive listening foments spiritual elevation is deeply rooted in European aesthetics, so it should be no surprise that scholars have continued to claim that better listening is both viable and politically improving.17 As the core technique of recognition, attentive listening has also been essential to musicological comparativism and the study of musical contact, encounter, and exchange. In his 1993 study Music in Renaissance Magic, pointedly subtitled Toward a Historiography of Others, Gary Tomlinson professed his desire to “turn away from the easily heard voices from [the] past and to listen hard to other voices that have seemed almost too distant to hear”—a mission steeped in the anthropology of Clifford Geertz and the literary New Historicism that Geertz helped to inspire.18 Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations of 1988, a key text of New Historicist theory, had represented the business of historical literary inquiry as a “straining to listen” to voices of the dead.19 In recent years, though, the idea that listening in a historically or cross-culturally sensitive way involves strain—a kind of aural heavy lifting—has yielded to ideals of listening either as a kind of dazzling technical wizardry or a more cautious, almost bureaucratic collaboration. In the introduction to their brilliant collection of essays on historical sonic encounter, Acoustemologies in Contact, Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne Cusick lionize listening that proceeds “consultatively” as well as being “virtuosic”; they borrow the second of these words from the anthropologist Martin Daughtry, who uses it to describe the skilled auditors of wartime landscapes.20 Wilbourne and Cusick’s listening vocabulary is thus at once managerial and theatrical. It seems to me that this language responds to two sides of a pincer movement, which is currently squeezing arts and humanities disciplines within the neoliberal academy: on the one hand, the powerful incentive to demonstrate activist political credentials and, on the other hand, the imperative to deliver the measurable metrics of so-called impact. In many circumstances, these pressures, apparently issuing from opposing ends of the political spectrum, are barely distinguishable. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, when musicians and music scholars are tempted to claim that being “good listeners,” in the widest ethical sense, is their disciplinary strong suit.

The view that I advance in this essay is that the claim to good listening has historically almost always depended on a politically problematic fantasy of attentiveness, which ultimately serves to strengthen and sequester communities of “good listeners.” By analogy with the megalomaniac delusion of omniscience, and with a nod to the Cagean ideal of panaurality, I call this fantasy “omniaudience.” Omniaudience refers to the belief that people—­certain classes of people, it almost always turns out—can and should listen to everything. As we will see, omniaudience has a long history, extending at least as far back as the taxonomic projects of liberal musician-scholars in late eighteenth-century England and their earliest ventures in musical comparativism. This essay is devoted to exploring one small corner of this history—a corner that I take to be representative—so that I can propose an answer to two questions. First: When did Euro-American music scholarship start to conceive of its mission as cultivating good listeners, and to equate good listening with a heightened attention to and recognition of sonic differences? And second: Has the disciplinary objective of attending to differences always been yoked to the liberal project of recognizing and valuing difference?21

* * *

There are many places that a music scholar could begin the history of good listening, but there are several reasons to start with William Crotch’s lectures on music at the Royal Institution in London, which he began in 1804.22 They were something of a landmark in the history of modern musical disciplinarity. Crotch was in demand as a speaker in the capital. He was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford University, a supremely talented keyboard player and respected composer, an aesthetic theorist and music historian, and a leading proponent of so-called ancient music. The Royal Institution was a newish body, founded in 1799 by the American Sir Benjamin Thompson. It was one of a generation of learned societies in London and the provinces that aimed to disseminate knowledge to a broadly conceived public, to teach through “regular courses of philosophical lectures and experiments, the application of the new discoveries in science,” as a description from 1809 put it.23 Notably, Crotch inaugurated music as a subject worthy of study at the Royal Institution, following lectures that had, until then, been devoted largely to the natural sciences: His predecessors included the chemist Thomas Garnett and the professor of natural philosophy Thomas Young, who covered subjects such as hydrodynamics, electricity, and optics.24 This context is crucial in the story of listening as a didactic framework, since Crotch’s lectures proceeded from the idea that he was charged with teaching a learned constituency of nonmusicians how to listen better. By the early nineteenth century, musical novices or aspirant chapel masters could buy or borrow plenty of instructional books on reading, performing, and composing music. But barely any of these books primarily addressed or sought to improve listeners—that is, a group of people whose goal was to listen to music attentively and knowledgeably, rather than to help make it. The listener—and in particular the good listener—as a viable social role was partly a function of changing institutional configurations, represented precisely by such bodies as the Royal Institution and Crotch’s university employer.

Though distinctively shaped by British colonialism, as we will see, these institutional changes were by no means exclusively British. Parallel trends are discernable in early nineteenth-century Berlin, where, as Desmond Sheehan has shown, a succession of Napoleonic-era disruptions of the city’s old learned societies displaced music-making institutions such as Carl Friedrich Zelter’s Singakademie into the modern research university. This process of displacement more or less created a career for Adolf Bernhard Marx, whose many publications, issuing from an evolving Prussian arts curriculum, helped to determine what good listening was—at least where a subcategory of elite European music is concerned—for the next century or more.25

In Britain, the scholarly publication to which Crotch responded most directly was Charles Burney’s General History of Music, completed in 1789—one of the earliest narrative histories of European music. Burney provided detail about composers, performers, institutions, genres, and musical techniques, and was forthrightly opinionated about them. But by and large Burney did not prescribe, approve, or even theorize ways of listening. To inculcate listening techniques supposedly adequate to the many kinds of music he described was not Burney’s main concern. Like most eighteenth-century writers, he proceeded on the assumption that music was on an upward trajectory and had been constantly improving until his own day: Volume One of his history presumed the “contented ignorance of barbarous times” and the “slow progress of human knowledge.”26 This premise caused a minor spat between Burney and Crotch following the first course of Royal Institution lectures. The venerable historian drafted a letter to his young contemporary in 1805, admonishing him for daring to criticize Joseph Haydn, a composer still widely lauded in London since the epochally successful Hanover Square concerts of the mid 1790s.27 Burney knew Haydn personally and regarded his latest music—which by 1805 included the much celebrated oratorios The Creation and The Seasons—as the apogee of music history.

Crotch had indeed expressed doubts, shared by a number of contemporaries in England and beyond, about word painting in The Creation.28 But his quibbles, and the boldness with which he asserted them, were evidence of a deeper disagreement with Burney. Crotch’s values were those of the Concert of Antient Music. To him, music history was less teleology than cycle, and every age was characterized by episodes of growth and decline—episodes of the kind that Edward Gibbon had described in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, almost precisely contemporary with Burney’s history.29 Musical decadence was portended, in every age, by the preponderance of music that Crotch called “ornamental”: diminutive, charming, and playful.30 In a tripartite hierarchy adapted loosely from the popular art theories of Uvedale Price,31 the musically ornamental, Crotch explained, always existed alongside music that was sublime and beautiful. But this universalizing musical typology was, in its way, historically relativizing: In Crotch’s view, any music from any era or place could achieve the sublime (his highest-status category) and even the most recent music could be counted pleasing yet trivial. Hence his notional displacement of Haydn—whom he also liberally praised, by the way—from the pinnacle of music history.

In 1807, Crotch published, along with a short preface, Volume One of all the musical illustrations he had played during his Royal Institution and Oxford lectures—an immense range of music, transcribed for keyboard and notated on the grand stave. The book was arranged not chronologically but according to the aesthetic terms of Crotch’s discussions. This meant that a movement from a recent symphony by Haydn appeared cheek by jowl with operatic excerpts by Gluck, “ancient” liturgical music by Orlando Gibbons, Hungarian dance tunes, a cobbler’s hornpipe, and a good deal of “national music” (Crotch’s term, and the term of choice among his English contemporaries) from places ranging from South Africa to Denmark. As Howard Irving points out, the title of Crotch’s publication is telling, given the institutional context of his lectures: Specimens of Various Styles of Music.32 As in the theatrical experiments and taxonomic displays of the natural sciences—the main focus of the Royal Institution lectures—Crotch presented a collection of specimens, each one representing a genus or species. Each specimen was supposed to be audibly distinct. Crotch’s “various styles” are without doubt an emergent version of the biocultural “audiotypes” that Rachel Mundy has theorized in her antihumanist critique of Guido Adler’s late nineteenth-century musical style concept.33 Crotch’s compendium of music drawn from a newly imagined globe aimed above all to teach listeners to detect and understand differences. The preface of the Specimens numbered among the collection’s objectives the education of the musician’s taste, so as to “prevent his being bigoted to particular sorts of music.”34

The early nineteenth-century texts of Crotch’s Royal Institution lectures survive only in scattered manuscript form, though they were adapted for publication in the 1830s as the Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music. By this time, Crotch confidently dismissed the now old-fashioned outlook of Burney’s Whig musical history—the view, as Crotch skeptically put it, that “music is continually improving.”35 Crotch contrasted this with his own vision of “just criticism,” which he sought to impart to the “musical student”: the art of “discriminating and comparing the several styles, and of appreciating their relative value.” Good listening now equaled discrimination.36

I want to pause over Crotch’s concept of “discrimination” here, partly to uncover the buried relationship between the word’s more recent, negative meaning and its older (but still current) positive one. To discriminate, as Johnson’s 1755 dictionary had put it, is to “mark with notes of difference”—to appreciate differences, which is usually a sign of knowledge or discernment.37 The negative sense of discrimination as an unethical and sometimes unlawful practice within a liberal polity is no less concerned with the perception of difference: To discriminate reprehensibly is also to notice differences—maybe even the very ones that others notice with a purer intent. But, rather than celebrate the fact of difference, the bad discriminator invests these differences with unwarranted values and hierarchies.

No reader of this essay will be surprised when I say that the first (positive) kind of discrimination encouraged by Crotch, despite his professed desire to eliminate bigotry, is also of the second (negative) kind. As the argument of this essay unfolds, it will become ever clearer that every liberal attempt to appreciate difference with texture and understanding, no matter how well meaning, is vulnerable to a critique (no less liberal) that shows how this difference could have been appreciated with still greater texture and understanding. Acute musical attention, in other words, reveals the need for more acute or discerning audition. Crotch is, in this respect, an easy target. More important to my argument, though, is to observe that any conception of aural discrimination of the sort that Crotch tried to inculcate already assumed his and his audience’s right to listen to, and potential to listen competently to, more or less any kind of music in existence. The contents pages of the Specimens of Various Styles of Music provide a startling summary of the ambitious scope of Crotch’s roving ear (see Figure 4.1). Here, then, is the foundational principle of omniaudience: The discriminating ear can always be turned receptively toward a world of distinct musical voices, “marking the notes of difference.” This is surely the acquisitive aural orientation that Dylan Robinson, elaborating his ethic of Indigenous sound studies, has called hungry listening.38 For if Crotch’s contents page expresses a primitive version of the universalist fantasy of deep listening—“listening in every possible way to everything possible”—it also displays with unusual clarity the ethical hazards that have always been part of ethnomusicological self-examination, but have lately plagued the discipline with particular force: how to distinguish desirable pluralism from mere food court multiculturalism; how to avoid converting music into a delectable fruit salad of mingling culture-portions; how to escape a research environment in which scholars have extracted sonic specimens to fuel an economy of Euro-American disciplinary prestige; and, crucially, whether or not to endorse the relentless making-legible of music to the omniaudient Euro-American ear.

Kahn, in his interrogation of sound across the twentieth-century arts, points out that Cagean panaurality became thinkable partly because of technologies such as the microphone, which created the impression that listening could be extended prosthetically into formerly inaudible corners of the universe. But once this radical conceptual extension had taken place, the technological mediators that made it possible disappeared from view.39 Something similar happened in the case of Oliveros’s deep listening. Oliveros traced her early revelations in listening to a tape recorder bought for her by her mother in 1953. “I noticed that the microphone was picking up sounds that I had not heard while the recording was in progress,” she recalled.40 Her subsequent mantra, “listen to everything all the time,” was thus modeled on the supposedly expanded receptivity of the microphone.

In Crotch’s case, the media technologies that, like the experimentalists’ microphone, rendered the world’s music legible are even less obvious, perhaps, because they are these days so unexceptional. There is the book itself, of course, which blended the ethos of the contemporary miscellany and anthology with the lexicographical and completist ambitions of the encyclopedia. And inside is the two-stave notational format to which all the specimens were adapted—a technology that allowed the widest access within an extensive European and colonial market for musical prints directed at amateurs. Crotch explicitly addressed this constituency in his preface, explaining that his specimens furnished “good subjects for practice.”41 The stave was inseparable from the standard topography of keyboard instruments, the interface through which every one of the specimens became comparable, and all differences appreciable. The preface to the Specimens also gestured toward several ancillary tools of legibility, which, to the present-day scholar, can only seem portents of the standardizing processes of nineteenth-century industrial modernity. For instance, Crotch’s opening table, entitled “Time of the Specimens,” assimilated each of his examples to the logic of his simple pendulum metronome (see Figure 4.2).42 Institutions may have created the viable category of listener, then, but it was this bundle of media technologies that produced the terrain of equivalence that modeled and enabled discriminating listening—and so arguably created Crotch’s audibly differentiated “various styles” themselves. Appreciating difference meant enforcing an inaugural equivalence.

Crotch’s specimens had dramatically different journeys toward this terrain of equivalence, after all, which involved divergent patterns of labor, extraction, and exploitation. The symphonic music by Haydn was native to Crotch’s media landscape: The Allegretto from the Symphony No. 82 would already have been known to most music lovers via printed keyboard reductions, which had been produced and sold concurrently with performances of Haydn’s symphonies in England since the 1780s. In this case, Crotch’s volume, like the reprints and excerpts that made up most eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century printed material, largely reaggregated existing media of the same kind. Items such as the Sanctus by Orlando Gibbons, by contrast, had been disseminated and gathered together in more diverse handwritten and printed forms over centuries, and gradually entered the eighteenth-century printscape via piecemeal transcriptions or adaptations, mostly by ancient music enthusiasts such as Crotch himself.

How “national music” ended up among Crotch’s specimens, especially examples from beyond Europe, was more obviously fraught. Much of the Indian music, such as the sample of tarana that Crotch singled out for special praise (see Figures 4.3a and 4.3b), was derived from a single source: William Hamilton Bird’s Oriental Miscellany, first published in Calcutta in 1789. Bird had gathered his materials from various people and places across British-dominated India, but, as research by Ian Woodfield showed some time ago, he also drew substantially on transcriptions prepared by prominent Anglo-Indian women, including Sophia Plowden, who, in 1787, made a trip from Calcutta up the Ganges to the court at Lucknow with her harpsichord and her husband, the East India Company officer Richard Plowden.43 Besides reproducing songs from Bird’s Miscellany, Crotch also consulted Plowden’s private collection of poetic and musical transcriptions.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the European musical-technological frameworks into which Plowden and Bird squeezed the songs they heard, and the wider British craze for “Hindostannie Airs” in the 1780s, were straightforward misrecognition, or even a species of colonial epistemic violence—violence ultimately sublimated into one of the tidily presented specimens of Crotch’s omniaudient compendium.44 But I want to be clear about what this conclusion also implies about listening: To deplore such musical misrecognition is to say that none of the actors involved was listening well enough—that is, that they were listening without the requisite virtuosity or consultative procedures. This is not a new criticism. Bird’s published transcriptions were condemned by several scholars at the time. The dedicatee of the Oriental Miscellany, Warren Hastings—who, by the time of Crotch’s Specimens, had, following a long and sensational trial, been acquitted of crimes committed during his time as governor-general of Bengal—had long insisted that British traders and rulers should immerse themselves in Indian texts and religious practices, and explicitly protested against what he called “the Interpolation of European Taste into the Recital of the Music of Hindostan.” A supposedly uncontaminated intimacy with Indian cultures was integral to the colonial knowledge project.45

A related but more nuanced position available to the present-day scholar—one adopted by Katherine Butler Schofield in a multifaceted creative project on Bird’s Miscellany alongside the harpsichordist Jane Chapman—is cautiously to celebrate products of the sonic contact zones of the late Mughal and early colonial period, such as the so-called nautch: fashionable parties at which troupes of high-status North Indian courtesans danced, recited, and sang.46 In these zones, Bird, Plowden, and others listened to and gathered their material. This position moves historical listening of the sort recorded by Bird’s Miscellany farther from mere misrecognition and closer to the “experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, [and] playfulness” envisioned by the Center for Deep Listening. Butler Schofield and Chapman invite us to hear, via Crotch’s Specimens, not only Bird and Plowden but also the compelling voices of non-Europeans, such as the legendary Kashmiri courtesan Khanum Jan, from whom Plowden learned many songs and poems. From the former silence, more voices resound. Lurking within even a colonial document such as Bird’s Miscellany is an untapped, subversive auditory richness. That’s the idea, anyway. But the point is this: The politically responsible scholar always aims at yet more attentive, yet more discriminating listening—an extended listening to “everything possible,” now both with and through the unvariegated musical mediascape of Crotch’s Specimens.

* * *

My foregoing discussion of Crotch’s Specimens implies that there is no form of listening that does not take its place on a liberal spectrum extending from good to bad, open minded to bigoted, extended to narrow, deep to shallow, true to false. Crotch’s inadequacies as a listener may be manifest, but to address them, so my discussion has suggested, is not to change his listening orientation as much as it is to refine and improve it.

There are alternatives to this view, though. A broadly decolonizing politics has led a generation of scholars, especially within Indigenous studies, to reject the liberal politics of recognition altogether—and the forms of attention it encourages—as the very opposite of political liberation. Recognition by the powerful is precisely how “colonial relations are produced and maintained,” asserts Glen Coulthard in his Frantz Fanon-inspired polemic against the liberal discourse of Indigenous rights.47 Lester Hu borrows this insight to theorize the sonic governance projects of eighteenth-century France and Qing-era China, arguing that conferring voices that can be listened to—“making the mute(d) submit themselves to empire’s phono-extractions”—was one of the main technologies of imperial domination.48 Good listening, as Crotch and his liberal successors envisioned it, is, in this context, no longer an unimpeachable good in itself. This is implicit when David Garneau queries “the belief that everything should be accessible to those with the means and the will to access” it, that “everything should be comprehensible”—the very idea, in other words, that Euro-American disciplines can or should, as Oliveros insisted, “listen to everything all the time.”49

From this perspective, people truly value difference not by improving the techniques or expanding the horizons of attention but by dwelling on what is, or ought to remain, unintelligible or inaccessible—by celebrating the insurmountable opacity that Édouard Glissant saw as essential to any self-determination: “Opacities must be preserved; an appetite for opportune obscurity in translation must be created.”50 In this spirit, Emily Apter’s anticosmopolitan intervention, Against World Literature, focuses not on moments of receptive self-examination, mutual transformation, or dialogic exchange—that is, the very stuff of comparativism—but the blockages of the untranslatable, even the dark glamor of mutual incomprehension.51 In music studies, Olivia Bloechl has similarly urged scholars to pay attention to the uncanny, out-of-place objects of colonial history, and so to those who are “prevented from reaching recognizable articulation in music,” whose presence is measurable only as awkward silence or spectral trace.52 Legibility is not desirable; it’s the problem.

And yet it seems to me that when scholars emphasize or even celebrate opacity they still risk reinforcing an old collection of romantic-modernist values, which elevate—in this instance, as epistemologically responsible and intellectually exciting—things that are formally intractable, semiotically unfathomable, and ontologically supersensible. Nothing is more familiar to scholars in the humanities, and nothing makes them feel more at home, than being presented with a runic fragment of culture that is hard or even impossible to understand—something so open-ended and unreachable that it perpetually goads the critic into discursive action.53 Even the prescient and transformative intellectual contributions of Tomlinson, starting out from his earliest mission to listen hard to what is “almost too distant to hear” in the European Renaissance, have since described an almost avant-gardist trajectory whereby the scholarly ear is compelled to bend to ever more dramatically inaccessible voices—from the half-century-old Aztec song traditions from which “no performable music writing survives” to the proto-music-making capacities that congealed “800,000 years before the advent of sapient humans.” No matter what the Euro-American scholar listens to, the Keatsian unheard melodies will always be sweeter.54 Something of this ethic and its suppressed aesthetic informs Glenda Goodman’s otherwise persuasive and energizing theory of “Music Transcription as Imperial Technology” in the eighteenth century, which posits a realm of absent listening that nonetheless remains potentially redemptive—a realm that stymies “full capture” by European notation and dramatizes “the tension between what persists and what is lost.”55 My view is that settler-colonial scholars should be careful when they imply that there is or was an Indigenous aural plenitude, forever out of colonial earshot. Rather than avoid imposing a Euro-American aesthetic on their object of study or appreciation, with its all-too-legible misrecognitions, this might just as well involve substituting one familiar aesthetic category for another—circumscribable beauty becomes ungraspable sublime. Opacity is the consequence of self-determination, of calculated indifference to an acquisitive, attentively grasping audience; for the same reason it is the primary formal feature of the romantic-modernist art work.

Besides, any conceptual scheme that opposes the presence of notation to an absent aurality does not challenge the assumption that notation is always a tool of sonic capture and preservation. This is an idea that became plausible only in the late eighteenth century, and may even have depended to some degree on processes of colonial extraction themselves. Just as the anthropologist Brian Hochman maintains that European ethnography naturalized twentieth-century sound reproduction technologies as a way of capturing the real, investing particular media forms with European ideologies of vanishing Indigeneity, so you could argue that eighteenth-century proto-ethnographic projects such as Plowden’s and Bird’s helped to secure the association—by no means self-evident—between notational technologies and sonic preservation.56 It is no accident, I would speculate, that only a few years after the first edition of Bird’s Miscellany, Breitkopf and Härtel began their complete works editions of Mozart and Haydn, the earliest preservationist projects of their kind.

The question of how historians might listen with, through, and against colonial technologies of inscription to recover traces of the aural domain of Indigenous voice is fundamental to a newer wave of sound-focused scholarship inspired by anthropologists of the ontological turn. Proponents of the ontological turn, rather than proceeding on the disciplinary premise that the world hosts a multiplicity of local “cultures,” each of which places its construction on a single nature, propose that human societies do not merely construe but make worlds, and so repeatedly create “nature” anew.57 Things that appear untranslatable, according to this view, are not the result of especially messy culture clashes as much as irreconcilable worlds. For Ana María Ochoa Gautier, writing mostly about nineteenth-century Colombia, the impasse of the sonically untranslatable can be surmounted, if at all, not through an unprecedentedly discriminating technique of intercultural understanding but through the scholar’s almost shamanic conjuring of other acoustic worlds.58 It is not clear to me yet whether Ochoa’s position truly conveys music studies beyond the liberal ethic of “good listening”—which is to say, beyond a radicalized version of Crotch’s premise—or whether it is a theoretically turbocharged version of the same thing, propelling the ideal of mutual proximity past some conceptual event horizon into the ecstatic merging of selves. Dissolving the subject-object binary has long been the goal of more conventional ethical programs of attention, after all (recall Peck’s promised “unification of speaker and listener”). Even Greenblatt’s New Historicist listening practice culminated in the startling revelation that he had realized while writing that “I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead”—a conception of historiography as a kind of spiritualism.59

Experimentalist panaurality and the older liberal ethic of good listening both idealize moments in which listening subject and sounding object merge. This partly explains why the language of vibration and resonance has become something of a disciplinary vernacular in recent musical ethnography and contemporary sound art—an echo of the vibrational ontologies in philosophy, which treat music, sound, and listening as contingent epiphenomena of a more fundamental, intermaterial motion.60 So Wilbourne and Cusick predicate their ethic of acoustemological encounter on the “conviction that sound—as vibrational force—necessitates bodies in sonic contact.” And in his trenchant essay “Against Listening,” the artist Brian House invokes the paradox of an “experiential knowledge not delineated by the conventional bounds of the subject” in his desire to “reach towards a political consciousness that includes the nonhuman.” Vibration allows listening to be dislodged from subjectivity itself. True omniaudience transcends listening altogether.61

Vibrational ontologies nonetheless tend to diverge from equally dispersed conceptions of distributed cognition or the extended mind, where “attention” is less a faculty of individual subjects than a shared cultural technique, mediated through a variety of materials and technologies.62 The main reason is this: The monist universalism of vibration swallows up and obliterates not only voices and listeners but technologies and bodies too.63 Everything is reducible to vibration. It strikes me that, as with the Schopenhauerian dissolution of the self in the Wagnerian music drama or Wordsworthian intimations of the symphonic connectedness of all nature, such vibrational fantasies—­popularized by sound artists and scholars, so experienced mostly in the context of white cube galleries and written histories and ethnographies—are better understood as aesthetic effects, and signally romantic-modernist ones at that.64 “Like harmony in music; there is a dark / Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, makes them cling together / In one society,” rhapsodized Wordsworth in The Prelude.65 The posthuman music aesthetic goes back a long way.

No wonder, then, that the scenario of distinctively musical listening keeps coming back, despite having been theorized away into vibrational everything-ness. Even in the most recent wave of posthuman political ecologies, listening to music, as in Wordsworth’s self-dispersing nature worship, remains a strikingly frequent metaphor for an ethically discriminating orientation toward the world. Anna Tsing’s plangent study of life amid capitalism’s broken global assemblages, The Mushroom at the End of the World, begins by invoking her own “revelation in listening” when following the “polyphonic” textures of “madrigal and fugue” in order to elaborate what she calls the “arts of noticing”: the capacity to discriminate marginal or underrepresented things such as fungi.66 Tsing’s landscapes are posthuman, postcolonial, even postapocalyptic. In them, subjectivity is always scattered across vast material networks. And yet we are still enjoined to deploy our listening skills to discriminate it all—skills acquired, in Tsing’s case, in the college seminars where she first encountered what Crotch would have called ancient music. Traces of a venerable liberal listening tradition are not hard to detect.

The aestheticized “world that speaks,” and the virtuous theorist who cultivates attention with special sensitivity, is an old trope of eco-criticism, prominent in works such as David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous. “That which we term ‘language’ is as much a property of the animate landscape as of the humans who dwell and speak within that terrain,” he writes.67 Jacob Smith’s Eco-Sonic Media is only the most recent instance of the eco-theorist as benevolent conferer-of-voices, turning his keen ear, in this case, to the “noise” of the shellac record, through which he hears the voices of the “kusum trees and reddish insects” that labored to produce its raw materials.68 To a student of eighteenth-century cultural history, the prototype of this ecological omniaudience is plain. It is a concept that Crotch would have recognized and endorsed: sympathetic resonance—that motif or perhaps master trope of the eighteenth century that, more even than the ideal of good listening, was foundationally bound up with music and sound. Like Peck’s true listening, sympathy promised to blend subject and object. Haydn’s English Canzonetta “Sympathy” expressed this modern ethical philosophy pithily, with a melody full of subtle repetitions and mirrorings: “each affection of thy heart / By sympathy is mine.”

But thinkers who have criticized the sympathetic ideal, including its postwar therapeutic recasting as empathy—not least historians of the transatlantic slave trade, from George Boulukos to Saidiya Hartman—have observed that its specular structure produces not only identification but also distancing.69 Sympathy collapses yet reinforces the distinction between self-consciously receptive “good listeners” and the gratefully listened to. As Lynn Festa argues in her profound analysis of the colonial dynamics of sympathy, the objects of sympathetic listening can never fully be absorbed into the larger collective, partly because, as the instigators of feeling attention, they serve to “consolidate our affiliation with others who feel the same way about a shared object.” The fully vibrational inclusivity of liberal fantasy will remain permanently out of reach.70

According to the liberal political paradigm I have been examining in this essay, bad listening is responsible for all the political problems of misrecognition; all misrecognition happens in the very moment that we listen. (How could it be otherwise?) For that reason, listening must always be extended, deepened, made truer, more consultative, more virtuosic. This was also the case with eighteenth-century sympathy. Brycchan Carey describes how the publicity campaigns of British abolitionists in the 1780s and after, whose stated goal was to arouse sympathy among the well-heeled British public for enslaved African people, obsessively sought out and denounced instances of false sentiment—a crime that could be repaired only by a still more acute and authentic form of sympathetic fellow-feeling.71 Likewise, any good listening depends on constant vigilance in the face of worse listening. It would seem that listening, in doses of ever greater purity, is the only possible cure for its own political shortcomings.

* * *

Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr. distinguish the liberal politics of discrimination from the Left politics of exploitation. The former is concerned with expunging a system’s biases, the latter with remaking exploitative systems themselves.72 The solution to discrimination, as we have seen, primarily involves changes in attitude: Rather than perceive difference and act unjustly, people should perceive difference and celebrate it. This was Crotch’s concern, and it remains a central concern of those in music studies today: We teach and learn, as rigorously as we can, how to discriminate sonic differences—partly, these days, in order that we do not end up as one of Crotch’s bigots, discriminating against a sound because of its difference. This is emblematically liberal insofar as it plays out its politics on the site of the self and within the domain of signs and culture. I don’t want to dismiss this kind of politics. Cultural practices are the main concern of music studies, after all (or at least they were, until the dawning incredulity with the nature-culture opposition, whose disciplinary consequences are yet fully to unfold). I want only to suggest that taking care to contemplate the frequently murky relationship between discrimination and exploitation—especially the ways in which concerns about the former can sometimes displace or conceal the reality of the latter—might inculcate greater humility about the limits of our disciplinary politics, especially “fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy,” as Olúfémi Táíwò bracingly puts it.73 Contemplating the relation of discrimination to exploitation might also remind even the most scrupulously attentive of scholars in music studies of what Stuart Hall once called the “necessary modesty of theory.”74 And it could help to dispel our discipline’s recurring colonial dream of omniaudience: the entitled idea that we are able—or even have the right—to hear “everything possible,” not to mention the narcissistic assumption that our listening has transformative political consequences.

Seeking to resist the subtle misrecognitions and extractive logic of the settler-colonial ear, Robinson, via Garneau, insists on the “irreconcilable spaces” of Indigenous knowledge.75 It is no coincidence, I think, that this strategically bounded conception of Indigenous sonic culture ends up looking formally similar to the polemical indifference and withdrawal of the Euro-American romantic-modern art work—perhaps even like an indigenized version of Milton Babbitt’s notorious insistence that he didn’t care who listened. Once again, the artwork, even in its uncommunicative refusal, models the best kind of human self-determination. And such refusal, therefore, does not prevent the extractive ear from aestheticizing as usual; it may even encourage it. Like Keats before his Grecian urn, the settler-colonial would-be listener, when confronted by a newly resistant and sublimely sovereign version of Indigenous sonic culture, is compelled to deploy the rhetorical strategies of apophasis or aposiopesis (that is: saying by theatrically not-saying or theatrically falling silent)—strategies that recreate the traditionally gendered dynamic that Barbara Johnson once called “muteness envy.” The “power of reclaimed silence,” writes Johnson, is “not unrelated to the idealization of muteness found in the aesthetic tradition”—a tradition that she traces to (where else?) Keats’s Grecian urn and its unheard melodies.76

At the same time, to exclude the extractive Euro-American ear from Indigenous spaces, no matter how discriminating and sympathetic it claims to be, is also, I would argue, to diminish the importance of listening altogether—by showing that the careful discriminations of the Euro-American attention economy may have fewer consequences for the exploitative relations of the material economy than many good listeners might wish. And at this point I become uncertain. For one thing, if good listening is less politically impactful than good listeners might fantasize, then it is surely also less urgent that today’s music scholars condemn previous generations of musicians, music-lovers, and settler-colonial scholars who—out of fascination, love, or the best of political intentions—once sought what used to be called cross-cultural understanding. The political and epistemological failings of giant comparativist projects such as Alan Lomax’s unfortunately named Global Jukebox—perhaps the closest modern descendant of Crotch’s Specimens—are much easier to address than the exploitative relationships that made them possible.77 And this makes me worry that the liberal politics of listening—good listening, bad listening, extended listening, hungry listening, true listening, bigoted listening, deep listening, consultative listening, or even the politically gracious refusal of listening altogether—can only be practiced within an infrastructure produced by exploitation, an infrastructure that may remain largely untouched, even as scholars, still in the tradition of Crotch, reorganize, expand, or deaccession their sonic specimens and recalibrate their feelings about them. Crotch, you might say, was there at the start, building the room in which good discrimination could be developed and bad discrimination expunged. But, as Táíwò writes, “Bad roommates aren’t the problem, for the same reason that being a good roommate isn’t the solution: the problem is that we are still trapped in the room.”78

Consider, once again, Sophia Plowden, sailing up the Ganges to Lucknow—a city, that, as all the scholars who have described this episode feel bound to point out, was to witness, in 1857, the beginning of the Indian Uprising, in the course of which Lucknow and the surrounding villages were brutally razed by British soldiers. It ought to go without saying that behind all of the Indian music that ended up among Crotch’s specimens was not just the “cultural logic” but the violent material exploitation of imperialism—a form of exploitation that was the very precondition for the better or worse listening practices of Plowden, Bird, Crotch, and indeed all subsequent generations of Euro-American music scholars. The point at which we are able to begin listening well—and so to start remediating the problems of discrimination—is so often the point at which exploitation has already happened. With this in mind, making distinctions between better or worse listeners—even between the most ravenous of hungry listeners and those who perform the painful Orphic turn away from the object of their love lest they destroy it—looks less like a matter of political urgency and more like the narcissism of small differences. Apprehending the exploitative work of often inaudible systems79 is rarely about pleasure or sentiment or self-improvement, and changing these systems or building new ones always involves more risk and material upheaval than changing how you listen or adjusting how you feel. The kind of discriminating listening that music scholars seek to cultivate, and the previously unheard voices and “various styles” that they accordingly promote, are politically vital. I would go so far as to say that this is the sort of cultural politics that music scholarship is best equipped to pursue. But exploitation demands reparation, and I am not sure that being listened to will ever be enough.

Notes

1. 1.  The inseparability of the politics of voice and the politics of listening is the premise of Daniel Gross, Being-Moved: Rhetoric as the Art of Listening (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020).
2. 2.  Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25–73, here 26.
3. 3.  Ralph Nichols and Leonard Stevens, “Listening to People,” Harvard Business Review 5 (September 1957), 65. The most influential elaboration of this premise in the disciplines of organization management and political theory was Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), which attempted in part to show how businesses and states could attend more effectively to the (disgruntled) voices of stakeholders and forestall mere abandonment and disillusion (“exit,” in Hirschman’s terms). Thanks to Brian Kane for this citation.
4. 4.  Vicky Mansuco Brehm, “Towards a ‘Listening Organisation’? Listening, Power, and Language in International Development NGOs,” INTRAC blogpost, April 11, 2017. https://www.intrac.org/towards-listening-organisation-research-update/.
5. 5.  See, for instance, Gross’s conception of psychoanalytic listening in Being-Moved, passim.
6. 6.  M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Touchstone, 2003), 127, 129. On “the work of attention,” 120–131.
7. 7.  Madelyn Burley-Allen, Listening: The Forgotten Skill (New York: Wiley, 1982); Michael Nichols, The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).
8. 8.  Nihal Arthanayake, Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations (London: Orion, 2022); Celeste Headlee, We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter (New York: Harper Wave, 2017).
9. 9.  See the essays in the colloquy convened by Martha Feldman, “Why Voice Now?” American Musicological Society 68, no. 3 (2015), 653–85; The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality, ed. Martha Feldman and Judith Zeitlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019); James Davies, Romantic Anatomies of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and esp. James Davies, “‘I Am an Essentialist’: Against the Voice Itself,” in The Voice as Something More, 142–68. Also Gross, Being-Moved, 12–15.
10. 10.  Catherine Clément, Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
11. 11.  Paul Robinson, review of Opera or the Undoing of Women by Catherine Clément, New York Times, January 1, 1989. Already in 1996, Roger Parker expressed a weary skepticism at the “empowerment of the umpteenth prima donna,” mostly via the concept of voice. See Parker, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 6. Marcus Pyle provides the most recent example in opera scholarship, arguing that the operatic femme fatale (Carmen and Salomé are his examples) “uses her voice to exploit the symbolic boundaries of authorial agency.” See Pyle, “The Rhetoric of Seduction, or Materiality Under Erasure,” Nineteenth-Century Music 41, no. 3 (2020), 194–208, here 195.
12. 12.  Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
13. 13.  John Cage cited in Frances Dyson, “The Ear That Would Hear Sounds in Themselves: John Cage, 1935 –1965,” in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 386. Edmund Mendelssohn observes that the expansive Cagean conception of listening ultimately turns every sound into “a living voice”—a voice that must, therefore, in Cage’s liberal ethic of sonic inclusion, be heard. See Mendelssohn, White Music Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 181.
14. 14.  Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Pauline Oliveros cited at the Center for Deep Listening: https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/pauline-oliveros/.
15. 15.  https://www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/.
16. 16.  Recently published as Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood, Hearing Studies (Red Hook, NY: Open Space, 2021). Quotation on p. 1 of the manuscript.
17. 17.  See, for instance, Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
18. 18.  Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43. See also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
19. 19.  Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1.
20. 20.  Suzanne Cusick and Emily Wilbourne, Introduction to Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (Cambridge: OpenBook, 2021), 9, 4. See also J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
21. 21.  On the changing politics of difference in music scholarship in particular, see the compendious and insightful introduction by Olivia Bloechl, with Melanie Lowe, to their edited volume Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1–52.
22. 22.  On Crotch’s status in elite European musical culture, see Howard Irving, Ancients and Moderns: William Crotch and the Development of Classical Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
23. 23.  Cited in Jamie C. Kassler, “The Royal Institution Music Lectures, 1800–1831: A Preliminary Study,” Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 19, no. 1 (1985), 1–30, here 4.
24. 24.  Kassler, “Royal Institution Music Lectures,” 14–21.
25. 25.  Desmond Sheehan, Sacred Harmonies: Music and Religion in Berlin, 1760–1840 (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2021), Chapter 4. To be as clear as I can: In sketching these British and Prussian institutional histories, I am proposing that the ideal of “good listening” that music historians might associate with the formalist theories of A. B. Marx or the early classicism of Crotch is not easily separated from the kinds of cross-cultural “good listening” that scholars more usually situate in the history of musical comparativism. We will see in the work of Crotch how these modes of “good listening” overlapped. In the Prussian case, which I don’t consider here, Marxian “good listening” could be placed in a tradition that includes the major figures of musical anthropology such as Carl Stumpf.
26. 26.  Charles Burney, A General History of Music, vol. 1 (London, 1776), 406.
27. 27.  See Irving, Ancients and Moderns, 38–40.
28. 28.  Irving, Ancients and Moderns, 193.
29. 29.  Like Burney’s history, volume one of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall was published in 1776.
30. 30.  William Crotch, Preface, Specimens of Various Styles of Music, vol. 1 (London, 1807), 2.
31. 31.  Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1794).
32. 32.  Howard Irving, “Empiricism, Ideology and William Crotch’s Specimens,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 9, no. 2 (2012), 237–53.
33. 33.  Rachel Mundy, “Evolutionary Categories and Musical Style from Adler to America,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (2014), 735–68.
34. 34.  Crotch, Preface, 1.
35. 35.  William Crotch, Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music (London: Longman et al., 1831), 15.
36. 36.  Crotch, Substance, 14–15.
37. 37.  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: Knapton et al., 1755) s.v. “discriminate.”
38. 38.  Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
39. 39.  Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 192.
40. 40.  Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening (Ignota Books, 2022), 33.
41. 41.  Crotch, Preface, 1.
42. 42.  Crotch, Preface, 15.
43. 43.  Ian Woodfield, “Collecting Indian Songs in Late 18th-Century Lucknow: Problems of Transcription,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3, no. 1 (1994), 73–88.
44. 44.  For a discussion of these dynamics in the case of Hindostannie airs, see Nicholas Cook, “Encountering the Other, Redefining the Self: Hindostannie Airs, Haydn’s Folk Song Settings and the ‘Common Practice’ Style,” in Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayal of the East, ed. Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 13–37; and Ian Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air’: English Attempts to Understand Indian Music in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 119, no. 2 (1994), 189–211.
45. 45.  Cited in Woodfield, “The ‘Hindostannie Air’,” 192.
46. 46.  https://scroll.in/article/884483/when-an-englishwoman-visited-mughal-courts-and-wrote-their-music-in-european-notation.
47. 47.  Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 17 (italics in original).
48. 48.  Zhuqing Lester Hu, “Chinese Ears, Delicate or Dull? Toward a Decolonial Comparativism,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 74, no. 3 (2021), 501–569, here 559.
49. 49.  David Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation,” West Coast Line (Summer 2013), 28–38, here 29.
50. 50.  Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 120.
51. 51.  Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).
52. 52.  Olivia Bloechl, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10–11.
53. 53.  Even Glissant, consistent with the linguistic concerns of contemporary Francophone philosophy, occasionally seems to treat the political challenge of Creole cultures as continuous with the interpretative challenge of the modernist text; see, for instance, Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 113–116.
54. 54.  Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5; Tomlinson, A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 26.
55. 55.  Glenda Goodman, “Sound Heard, Meaning Deferred: Music Transcription as Imperial Technology in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 51, no. 1 (2018), 39–45, here 44.
56. 56.  Brian Hochman, Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
57. 57.  The anthropologist most closely associated with the ontological turn is Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; see, for instance, the essays collected as Castro, The Relative Native (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
58. 58.  Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
59. 59.  Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 1.
60. 60.  In music studies, the major text remains Nina Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
61. 61.  Cusick and Wilbourne, “Introduction,” 1–2; Brian House, “Against Listening,” Contemporary Music Review 36/3 (2017), 157–170, here 160.
62. 62.  On distributed cognition, see Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); on the extended mind, see Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998), 7–19.
63. 63.  For a robust critique of vibrational ontologies in music studies as “vibrational monism,” see Brian Kane, “Do Vibrations Make Decisions?” Kalfou 9, no. 2 (2022), 318–327.
64. 64.  Another musical practice that has given aesthetic shape to vibrational ontologies, making them appear more plausible, is EDM (and the associated technology of speakers and subwoofers). Prominent contributions to vibrational sound studies by DJs include Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010) and Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).
65. 65.  William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 47.
66. 66.  Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 24, see 17–25 for the “arts of noticing.”
67. 67.  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1996), 139.
68. 68.  Jacob Smith, Eco-Sonic Media (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 38.
69. 69.  George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Saidyia Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
70. 70.  Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 54.
71. 71.  See Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 37–9, 72–4, et passim.
72. 72.  See the essays in Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr., No Politics But Class Politics (London: Eris Press, 2022), esp. 101–114; also Benn Michaels, “The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. Unemployment),” Twentieth-Century Literature 57, nos. 3–4 (2011), 309–27, here 316–17, et passim. Their critique is to an extent indebted to the analysis by Barbara and Karen Fields in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), esp. chapters 4 and 5.
73. 73.  Olúfémi Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), 74.
74. 74.  Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992],” in Stuart Hall: Essential Essays, vol. 1 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 84.
75. 75.  Robinson, Hungry Listening, 24, et passim.
76. 76.  Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy [1995],” reprinted in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 200–216, here 213.
77. 77.  See https://www.culturalequity.org/resources/gjb.
78. 78.  Táíwò, Elite Capture, 75.
79. 79.  Relatedly, Gavin Williams points out in his review of the volume Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, ed. Ronald Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) that oppressive structures such as empire need not always be audible at all, and that it is by and large scholars of music and sound who would like them to be. See Williams, Review of Audible Empire, Twentieth-Century Music 15, no. 1 (2008), 137–143, here 142.