I work on sound, music, media and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on music of Europe, Africa, and America, as well as global biographies of sound and other ephemera circulating in geographically-remote regions. The research includes the examination of links between political economy and digital sound technologies, poetics of copyright law in diverse sociotechnical environments, relations between aesthetics and censorship, sensory limits of mass-mediated music, mathematical geometries of musical time, histories of sound in philosophy, and the politics of biotechnification.
BOOKS
ARTICLES Fractal Harmonies of Southern Africa–on harmonic patterning and recursion The Subtraction of the World: Waste or Resource?–on cultural modes of reason underwriting global political economy On Sonotropism–on figures of sound in contemporary philosophy Wagner Redux: Badiou on Music of the Future–on the political aspect of Wagner’s forms Harmonic Fractals in the Music of the Lamellaphone–on mathematical recursion in African harmonic practice Temporal Geometries of an African Music–on ambiguities of meter formation in African music Dekonstruktives Denken in Lachenmann’s Musik–on deconstruction in the work of Lachenmann Musical Modernism in the Thought of Mille Plateaux, and Its Twofold Politics–on the politics of Deleuze and Guattari’s musical ideas Remarks on a Sketch of Gyorgy Ligeti: A Case of African Pianism–on Ligeti’s involvement with Shona music, and with that of Schumann and Chopin From Blatant to Latent Protest (And Back Again) (with Steve Smith)–on ambiguities of resistance in Madonna’s wartime music Gyorgy Ligeti and the Aka Pygmies Project–on Ligeti’s discovery and compositional use of African sound Music in the Thought of Deconstruction/Deconstruction in the Thought of Music–on the resonance of music with Derrida’s theory of language Heideggerian Thought in the Early Music of Paul Hindemith–a revision of the concept of Gebrauchsmusik in context Music, Corporate Power, and Unending War–on musical form under conditions of monopoly in the early 21st century Negotiating the Music Theory/African Music Nexus–an analysis of mbira dza vadzimu music, with a critical commentary Line, Rhythm, and a Motivic Detail in Mozart’s Piano Sonata in F Major (K.280), Adagio–on oscillation and undecidability in Mozart’s work Music, Spirit Possession and the Copyright Law–on sacred poetics of copyright law The Changing Role of Acoustics and Mathematics in Nineteenth-Century Music Theory–on musical autonomy and mathematics Anton Webern and the Concept of Symmetrical Inversion–on the symmetry concept in the late 19th century The Rondo-Finale of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony–a deconstructive reading of Mahler’s work Max Black’s ‘Interaction View’ of Metaphor–nudges a common analysis of metaphor toward poststructuralism Appropriate Data/Dada: A Partial Reading of a Fragment of Zimbabwean Mbira dza Vadzimu Music–an experimental text in ethnographic surrealism ONLINE ARTICLES AND PUBLISHED SYMPOSIA New Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives in African Music Pedagogy–proceedings of a forum for revitalizing African Music Studies Towards a Supplementary Approach to the Study of African Music within Modernity–brief remarks on strategic formalism BOOK CHAPTERS In Divisible Mobility: Music in an Age of Cloud Computing –on the political economy of music production, with reference to digital infrastructure Luciano Berio’s Coro–on a hidden genealogy of trans-disciplinary ideas, beginning with non-western instrumental technique Enforced Deterritorialization; or the Trouble with Musical Politics–argues that our century has become more Boulezian than Deleuzian Whose White Man Sleeps?–on aesthetics and politics in the music of Volans Double Voices of Musical Censorship After 9/11–on the paradoxical dialectics of censorship Approaching the Silence of Patterns: The Music of Michael Blake–a sketch of Blake’s compositional aesthetics Between African Ritual and European Romanticism –a sketch of Bongani Ndodana’s compositional aesthetics The Globalization of South African Art Music –on art music in the late years of apartheid Music, Corporate Power, and the Age of Unending War–on the relevance of Adorno to music production in the early 21st century The Form is/in the Function: Situating the African Keyboard Music of Kevin Volans –on the political stakes of musical form In Memory of a Receding Dialectic–on autonomy in modernist musical aesthetics Art Music in a Cross-Cultural Context–on African art music of the 20th century The Return of the Aesthetic–on musical formalism and its place in political critique Feminine/Feminist: In Quest of Names with No Experiences (Yet) –on dis/connections between Boretz and Hegel A/Symmetrical Reading of Inversion in fin-de-siècle Music, Musicology and Sexology–on the concept of inversional symmetry REVIEWS Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research. (Kevin Korsyn. 2003)–Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2006. Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions (Kofi Agawu. 2003)–Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2005. REVIEW ESSAYS Of Sleeping White Men: Analytic Silence in the Critical Reception of Kevin Volans Notes on a Postcolonial Musicology: Kofi Agawu and the Critique of Cultural Difference Rethinking Music as/in Musical Rethinking: Proscriptions, Opportunities When the Music of Psychoanalysis Becomes the Psychoanalysis of Music Veit Erlmann’s Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West The ‘New Poetics’ of Musical Influence: A Response to Kevin Korsyn
Musical Property: Widening or Withering?–on the property concept; its discontents and contents
Gender and Sexuality in South African Music (Chris Walton and Stephanus Muller. 2005)–Women and Music, 2007.