Rancière and Music

João Pedro Cachopo is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow with a joint affiliation to the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the University of Chicago Patrick Nickleson is Postdoctoral Researcher at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario. Chris Stover is an Associate Professor of Music Studies and Research at Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, where he directs the PhD program and teaches courses in music theory, musicology, and jazz. His recent book Reimagining Music Theory: Contexts, Communities, Creativities was published by Routledge as part of the College Music Society’s Emerging Fields in Music series, and he is co-editor of Rancière and Music (EUP) and Making Music Together: Analyzing Musical Interaction (OUP, in press). He has published many articles and chapters that bring critical theory and music studies into robust dialogue, including essays in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Music Theory Online, Perspectives of New Music, Analytical Approaches to World Music, The Open Space Magazine, Engaging Students, the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education, Queer Ear, Deleuze and Children, Machinic Assemblages of Desire, and many more. He is also an improvising trombonist and composer.

Jacques Rancière has emerged as one of the most influential of contemporary French philosophers writing on aesthetics and its relation to politics today. His work has excited much debate on an international scale, in particular in the visual arts, and film studies. The present volume, a collection of essays on Rancière edited by João Pedro Cachopo, Patrick Nickleson and Chris Stover, is therefore extremely timely. But what is particularly important about this collection is that it focuses on the application of Rancière’s theories to music, an art form that occupies a small but very meaningful position in Rancière’s large output. The range and diversity of the essays in this collection is remarkable. These highly original, creative and innovative contributions towards an understanding of Rancière’s seminal work will undoubtedly serve to stimulate new thinking and debate within the aesthetics and sociology of music in the Anglophone world.

• IntroductionJoão Pedro Cachopo, Patrick Nickleson and Chris StoverSection I. Music and Noise1. Musique concrète and the Aesthetic Regime of ArtLoïc Bertrand2. ‘Rip it up and start again’: Reconfigurations of the Audible in the Aesthetic Regime of the ArtsDaniel Frappier3. A Lesson in Low MusicPatrick NicklesonSection II. Politics of History4. Wandering with Rancière: Sound and Structure under the Aesthetic RegimMartin Kaltenecker5. Staging Music in the Aesthetic Regime of Art: Rancière, Berlioz and the Bells of Harold en ItalieJoão Pedro Cachopo6. Rancière on Music, Rancière’s Non MusicKatharina Clausius7. Coloured Opera and the Violence of Dis-IdentificationWilliam Fourie and Carina VenterSection III. Politics of Interaction8. Musical Politics in the Cuban Police OrderKjetil Klette Bøhler9. Rancière and Improvisation: Reading Contingency in Music and PoliticsDan DiPiero10. Rancière’s Affective ImproprietyChris StoverSection IV. Encounters and Challenges11. Rancière, Resistance and the Problem of Commemorative Art: Music Displacing Violence Displacing MusicSarah Collins12. Stain.Murray Dineen13. On Shoemakers and Related Matters: Rancière and Badiou on Richard WagnerErik M. Vogt14. Roll Over the Musical Boundaries: A Few Milestones for the Implementation of an Equal Method in MusicologyDanick TrottierAfterword: A Distant SoundJacques RancièreWorks CitedIndex