Beyond the "State of Permanent Tension": Listening Affirmatively to Black Madness in the Music Classroom

• In Event: Sound Pedagogies: Theoretical and Material Possibilities for Studying Knowledges in Action

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
In this paper, I draw from my in-school doctoral music research-creation to consider the ways in which the inconceivability of Black mad music echoes the trans-national project of marginalizing communities through rendering them excessive yet ‘inaudible’ (Tchumkam, 2019; Weheliye, 2005). Thinking with the intersection of critical dis/ability studies and critical race theory in what Pickens (2019) dubs Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, I explore how educational practitioners might listen differently, affirmatively to racialized neurodivergence in music classrooms, with implications for the inclusivity of the wider curriculum.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
Music curricula (Hess, 2018) and sound studies scholarship (Pinto, 2016) frequently adopt a white universalist perception of the aural.

For Chen (2012) and Weheliye (2014), racializing and dis/abling assemblages operate through the affective dis/capacitation of bodyminds, inscribing a lesser capacity to affect than to be affected. In sonic encounters, this occurs through the auditory racializing filter, sorting white (and neurotypical) music, from Black (and neurodivergent) ‘noise’ (Eidsheim, 2019; Stoever, 2016). Yet, Moten (2018) finds optimism in this filter. For Moten, while Blackness requires the racist’s frame to be audible, it is also always-already in excess of the capability of the racist to frame it. Through this ‘ceaseless fugitivity’, Blackness — rather than a comparison to ‘what it is not’ (i.e. white) — exists in the ‘chromatic saturation’ that evades the racist/racializing ‘tyranny of the octave’. Or, as Pickens (2019) contends, sight and time are inadequate to the task of Black madness.

Russel’s (2008) Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization disrupts the paucity of a major/minor binary through a modal, ‘gravitational’ understanding of harmony; this modality centers the Lydian scale as the most ‘open’ or ‘lightest’ sounding scale through the overtone series (p. 2). I compose-with the saturation of this modality and Black mad compositions in early childhood classrooms go upset the “tyranny of the octave” (Moten, 2018, p. 156), or what Russel (2008) calls the major-scale “state of permanent tension” (p. 7).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
This research was conducted as a series of music composition workshops in a Grade 1 classroom in Leeds, Northern England. Research-creation is the imbrication of art, research and theory in event. The episodes were recorded into digital music production software.

Results and significance
An excerpt from four-weeks of composition with tonal instruments and the Lydian scale will be shared. Composing-with this mode in early childhood classrooms disrupts the major/minor binary. Concomitantly, affirmatively composing-with Black mad practices disrupts the audible/inaudible binary. This contributes to research that explores the musicality of stimming (Bakan, 2014; Fessenden, 2019) through adopting a specifically intersectional frame (Crenshaw, 1991; Puar, 2012). This paper also poses implications for how practitioners might listen differently in music classrooms, not just in crafting more socially-just spaces, but in overtly challenging the prescience of racialized Autism as the site of noisy inaudibility.

Author

• David Ben Shannon, Manchester Metropolitan University