Derek Baron | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (original) (raw)

Papers by Derek Baron

Journal of the Society for American Music, Apr 4, 2024

This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagshi... more This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal offreservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of "civilization" and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagshi... more This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal offreservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of "civilization" and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Wooster Group’s 2017 The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album In... more The Wooster Group’s 2017 The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation has three actors reanimate a 1965 vinyl LP of prison work songs. This formally simple production embeds a series of almost imperceptible shifts between past and present, thus “interinanimating” the men on the record and the men onstage, conjuring an “abolition phonography”: a mode of sensory (dis)formation that short-circuits the racial ideologies of the senses and points towards a collective future.

Current Musicology, 2021

Western ontologies of music, sound, and listening have been constructed as normative and universa... more Western ontologies of music, sound, and listening have been constructed as normative and universal, casting all others as deficient, pathological, or primitive. The ongoing history of settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous land and life has shaped this colonial structure of listening in ways that music and sound studies has yet to fully confront. In his crucial new book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Dylan Robinson addresses these topics through a rich engagement with contemporary musicological discourses, sound studies, and Indigenous knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, this critical interrogation of settler musical and listening structures helps him imagine and identify Indigenous practices of artistic and material justice for aural sovereignty. Rooted in his own positionality as a Stó:lō person who grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver, Robinson's book investigates "sonic encounters between particular perceptual logics," namely Indigenous and settler listening orientations and their "admittedly uncomfortable pairing" (2). Robinson offers the conceptual hermeneutic of "hungry listening" as a way to describe an extractive settler-colonial mode of perception that persistently misapprehends Indigenous sound as available for dispossession. By theorizing hungry listening and identifying its epistemic violence in action, Robinson makes way for the careful consideration of Indigenous sounding practices that resist its appropriative logics. While the critique of hungry listening is a central concern for Robinson, it is these insurgent Indigenous practices that animate the text. Robinson thereby insists that scholarship need not limit itself to the description of dominant power but can also help us to perceive and imagine worlds beyond ongoing settler-colonial domination. Hungry Listening considers two principal sites for the struggle between hegemonic and insurgent listening practices: scenes of music-making (such as composition, curation, and spectatorship) and scenes of writing about music (such as musicology and sound studies). Opening with an epigraph revealing the deeply entrenched settler bias of celebrated Canadian composer R. Murray

Journal of the Society for American Music, Apr 4, 2024

This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagshi... more This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal offreservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of "civilization" and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagshi... more This article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal offreservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of "civilization" and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Wooster Group’s 2017 The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album In... more The Wooster Group’s 2017 The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” A Record Album Interpretation has three actors reanimate a 1965 vinyl LP of prison work songs. This formally simple production embeds a series of almost imperceptible shifts between past and present, thus “interinanimating” the men on the record and the men onstage, conjuring an “abolition phonography”: a mode of sensory (dis)formation that short-circuits the racial ideologies of the senses and points towards a collective future.

Current Musicology, 2021

Western ontologies of music, sound, and listening have been constructed as normative and universa... more Western ontologies of music, sound, and listening have been constructed as normative and universal, casting all others as deficient, pathological, or primitive. The ongoing history of settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous land and life has shaped this colonial structure of listening in ways that music and sound studies has yet to fully confront. In his crucial new book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Dylan Robinson addresses these topics through a rich engagement with contemporary musicological discourses, sound studies, and Indigenous knowledge. Perhaps most importantly, this critical interrogation of settler musical and listening structures helps him imagine and identify Indigenous practices of artistic and material justice for aural sovereignty. Rooted in his own positionality as a Stó:lō person who grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver, Robinson's book investigates "sonic encounters between particular perceptual logics," namely Indigenous and settler listening orientations and their "admittedly uncomfortable pairing" (2). Robinson offers the conceptual hermeneutic of "hungry listening" as a way to describe an extractive settler-colonial mode of perception that persistently misapprehends Indigenous sound as available for dispossession. By theorizing hungry listening and identifying its epistemic violence in action, Robinson makes way for the careful consideration of Indigenous sounding practices that resist its appropriative logics. While the critique of hungry listening is a central concern for Robinson, it is these insurgent Indigenous practices that animate the text. Robinson thereby insists that scholarship need not limit itself to the description of dominant power but can also help us to perceive and imagine worlds beyond ongoing settler-colonial domination. Hungry Listening considers two principal sites for the struggle between hegemonic and insurgent listening practices: scenes of music-making (such as composition, curation, and spectatorship) and scenes of writing about music (such as musicology and sound studies). Opening with an epigraph revealing the deeply entrenched settler bias of celebrated Canadian composer R. Murray