Matthew D. Morrison, the author of the article “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse,” works as an assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Center for Popular Music Studies, and Harvard University.
To challenge its arbitrary borders and expand the conceptual frameworks that have been developed to describe the field, its participants, and its discourses. This article emphasizes the widespread exclusionary practices in musicology, particularly with regard to racially based individuals, racialized groups, and racial interactions. In order to achieve the objective, the author defines and put into practice the idea of “Blacksound”—the audible and physical heritage of blackface performances as the source of all popular music, art, and culture in the US. Blackface, which initially appeared during chattel slavery in the US, contributed to the development of the modern music industry and Guido Adler’s definition of Musikwissenschaft (Morrison, 781). The article shows how behavior, identity, and material relations have been bound to the creation of popular music and its marketing from the early nineteenth century. The phenomenon of blacksound is the performative and artistic equivalent of blackface.
Additionally, the article demonstrates the relationship between exclusionary practices relevant to musicological argumentation and the racist and supremacist ideologies that dominated society and popular culture in the nineteenth century. This article defines and uses Blacksound as a method of putting race, ethnicity, and their connection with other forms of identity at the center of how we approach and choose our subject matter and develop musicological conceptual frameworks within the expansion of music studies in order to mitigate the effects of such traditions.
Work Cited
Morrison, Matthew D. “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 72 No. 3, 2019, pp. 781–823. Web.