Music, Lalangue, and the Real Unconscious (original) (raw)

Music and Non-Human Agency (2017)

Post, Jennifer (ed., 2018), Ethnomusicology – A Contemporary Reader, Volume II, pp. 181–194. NY & London: Routledge., 2018

A well-known definition of music states that what we understand with this term may be subsumed under "humanly organized sound:" This was formulated by John Blacking (1973, 3) in his celebrated book "How Musical is Man?" His proposal, however, was not uncontested, and many authors have tried to complement, contradict, or reaffirm this idea of how the phenomenon music could be framed. What is of interest here is the adverb "humanly," because it limits musical action and appreciation to processes that are essentially human, thereby excluding non-human agency. In this chapter, I will explore how far "the human" can be essentialized in relation to music and in which sense agency beyond the human could be, or even has to be, acknowledged within this context.