Sound Philosophy

This episode covers elements of blues harmony, melody, and form to demonstrate that our typical picture of the blues is far too simplistic and the blues itself is far more interesting than we assume. I then go on to discuss the early appearance of blues in sheet music and in recordings (including the beginning of the Blues Craze in 1920 with Mamie Smith's version of the Perry Bradford composition, "Crazy Blues").

This episode uses Highlife music of Ghana to investigate a Nietzschean take on aesthetic attunement (what he terms Rausch), aesthetic form, and the production of the self. I begin by outlining how Ghanians employed ahaha, konkoma, and dance highlife to create a new sense of self for young people after the colonialist disruption of traditional modes of life and hierarchy. I then to turn to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche's ideas concerning aesthetic attunement which is disinterested and yet passionate in order to assess how music might be employed in the production of the self. In the last segment, I broach the issue of Nietzschean "bad conscience" as it pertains to the colonial situation. I end by imagining how highlife music might be construed as a reversal of bad conscience, a way of turning the suffering of the passions into joy. 

This episode discusses syncretism (amalgamation of different religions, philosophies, cultures, or schools of thought) as it applies to music in the colonial situation of Ghana at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Syncretism is not simple amalgamation, however. It can involve accommodation but it can also be a subtle form of rebellion. Using this concept as a platform, I turn to various forms of Ghanian popular music that fed into highlife and then the early years of highlife itself. I take a close look at the song "Yaa Amponsah," first recorded by the Kumasi Trio (featuring Kwame Asare, also known as Jacob Sam, on guitar) in 1928. 

This episode examines WEB DuBois's notion of "double consciousness," which he defines as a way in which Blacks have both the opportunity and the curse of seeing the world in a manner he suggests was unavailable to Whites. I read from the two essays in which DuBois employs the term and address some of the difficulties facing its interpretation. I then employ the term to examine the participation of Black performers in Blackface minstrelsy, specifically James Bland and Bert Williams. Our focus turns to Williams's signature character, the Jonah Man, which I construe as a subtle and sly critique of social indifference. 

This episode explores the various issues surrounding musical improvisation. Is there such a thing as creatio ex nihilo? What is the role of the future and the past in improvisation? What is the role of tradition and freedom? I discuss some ideas on inspiration and improvisation in Nietzsche's Human, All-Too-Human, Adorno's objections to improvisation as it is generally practiced, improvisation in relation to the three modes (or syntheses) of time, and improvisation in relation to free will (employing the thought experiment of Buridan's Ass and some thinking by Adorno). Throughout the episode, I weave in observations on and quotations from the Grateful Dead on cliches, improvisation, and the choices involved in making something through improvisation. 

Starting with the reversals of cultural borrowing or appropriation in the cakewalk, this episode examines ragtime and its various inversions or reversals. I discuss the emergence of ragtime out of the coon song with all of its problematic racial representations, the "problem" of Black music at the turn of the 20th century (and the lack of Black musical representation in the official program of the Columbian Exposition),  the efforts of composers such as Scott Joplin to transform ragtime into a quasi-classical form of instrumental music, and the objections voiced by James Weldon Johnson to the "nationalism" of the ragtime craze versus the "racialism" of its origins. The episode concludes with a discussion of syncopation and its eerie corporeality.

This episode provides an overview of the remainder of The Birth of Tragedy with a focus on the emergence of the Socratic impulse and its connection to an overemphasis on logic and rationality at the expense of the instinctual drives of the Apollinian and the Dionysian. Then I discuss elements of the connection between the Apollinian and Dionysian as manifested in the "symbolic dream image." After introducing Herbert Marcuse's accusations against the conformity of modern society, I explore various notions surrounding the very popular conception of the Dionysian in the United States of 1960s: the resistance to the "madness" of instrumental rationality, the need for creative spontaneity, but also the threat of a possible fascist element within the Dionysian. I conclude with some thoughts about the Apollinian and the Dionysian as they relate to the Grateful Dead. 

This is the third episode in our series on Nietzsche. It examines the controversial and oft-misunderstood doctrine of the eternal recurrence for what it might tell us about the structuring of time (here I draw on Deleuze) and about how repetition in music operates in popular music. I review some of Adorno's complaints about popular music and the distinction between progressive time and repetitive time. I then turn to a discussion of how the notions of the Apollinian and Dionysian are transformed in Nietzsche's The Gay Science, focusing on the idea that we ought to "become what we are." This leads to the examination of the eternal recurrence and a manner of reading the repetition in popular music as a liberating and redeeming quality, not, as Adorno would have it, a symbol of our unfreedom. 

We continue our multi-episode exploration of the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and its application to music. In this episode, we broach the generative antagonism Nietzsche believes is embodied in the interactions between what he terms the Apollinian and the Dionysian. These are not concepts; they are drives or instincts. They are as caught up in nature and the body as they are in philosophy and the mind. Indeed, for Nietzsche there is no easy distinction between mind and body. The Apollinian deals with beauty, clarity, individuation, bounded knowledge, and representation. The Dionysian addresses the sublime, ambiguity, self-forgetting, boundless feeling, and the Schopenhauerian Will. I conclude the episode by examining meter/rhythm and pitch/tone as manifestations of the relationship between the Apollinian and the Dionysian. 

This is the first in a series of episodes examining the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and their possible applications to the understanding of popular music. In this episode, I prepare us for a discussion of Nietzsche's first book The Birth of Tragedy by examining three of Nietzsche's predecessors: Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer. We investigate some selected aspects of their aesthetic and metaphysical thought--aspects that I will try to demonstrate either influenced Nietzsche or stand in marked contrast to what he tries to accomplish in his writings.