Martin Scherzinger

Media Theorist, Musicologist, and Composer

Luciano Berio’s Coro: Nexus Between African Music and Political Multitude

Traces Luciano Berio’s interest in Central African music, dramatized by the composer’s unique approach to instrumental technique in Coro. The empirical origins of this technique are followed aspects of its formal musical articulation in both the original Banda Linda music and in Coro are demonstrated. The aesthetic dimensions of Coro are assessed, and an aspect of the music’s afterlife in Western intellectual history, notably in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is examined. The way that music and sound circulate within different regimes of meaning and value are tracked with a particular interest in retrieving the often tributary and ephemeral phenomena found in geographically remote cultures that, for complex reasons, are systematically written out of world history.

Double Voices of Musical Censorship After 9/11

Offers a brief typology of music’s restricting circumstances in a particular historical moment: the post-9/11 United States. Cases are presented that focus on the intrusive side of music’s inevitable mediating layers, with particular reference to new sites and forms of censorship following the attacks of September 2001, without losing sight of the paradoxical nature of musical censorship–its double voice–in assessing its scope and authority. The essay begins by discussing some cases of relatively overt censorship, with a particular focus on the removal of existing songs from various important broadcasting channels (or the placing of prohibitive obstacles before them in such contexts). Following this general discussion, it examines the removal of music by the Dixie Chicks from many radio stations in 2003 in more detail. The second set of cases presents a more subtle form of censorship: the voluntary removal of musical products or cancellation of events out of forbearance or sensitivity in the context of a current political sentiment. In particular, it examines the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s cancellation of a performance of choruses from John Adams’s The death of Klinghoffer. The underlying justification for this essay is the contention that it is the silent and invisible acquiescence of the cautious and compromised artist that ultimately registers the extent of genuine political power.