“Do You Hear Me, Though?”: Ramsey and the Politics of Black Music Inquiry

I met the musicological titan, Guthrie “Guy” Ramsey, Jr., at my very first American Musicological Society conference in 2007 at Quebec City. Ramsey sat on Charles Atkins's presidential plenary panel on the topic of race and ethnicity, one of many convenings on the topic since then. Although I hadn't fully settled on being a professional musicologist at the time (I was still in my MA program at Catholic University), when I heard Ramsey speak, I felt a familiarity, a likeness that I did not experience as the norm at this mostly white academic music conference. (Ramsey was also my most direct link to trailblazing Black music scholars Eileen Southern and Samuel Floyd, Jr., whose work I had encountered during my MA studies). It was clear to me that I was witnessing an intellectual giant, one who also spoke with a voice of comfort, self-awareness, and authority, with a delivery that felt familiar to me as a southern Black man raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Immediately after the panel, I ran over to speak to Ramsey (along with Ellie Hisama and George Lewis). He has proven a stalwart supporter of generations of scholars on Black music, as well as an intellectual example of what it means to “show up” as a musicologist, both in writing and in real time, within a field traditionally hostile to Black people.I use the term “godfather” to describe Ramsey in a few ways: its definitional sense (a man whose influence permeates a movement or organization); its pop-cultural sense (a well-respected figure known for doing what is necessary to take care of his “family”); and in its familial sense (as a person who promises to care for a child in the absence of a parent).1 I use “MusiQology” with a “Q” to invoke Ramsey's 2003 album (Dr. Guy's MusiQology: Y the Q?), the name of his pioneering music blog established early on in 2011, as well as his particular approach to melding criticism, performance, and historiography within his writing on and making of (Black) music.2 There are a number of lessons that I have learned from “the godfather of MusiQology” through his scholarship, mentoring, and advocacy. As I reflect on the breadth of his work—from deeply historiographic publications on Black music to close readings of the lives and music of luminaries such as Bud Powell and Jason Moran—I am struck by the timeliness of one of his classic essays: “Who Hears Here?” (2001). This polemical piece signaled a critical moment in music studies—a reckoning with the racial and racist practices inherent within musicological inquiry up until the moment of its writing. And while there have been several demographic, political, and cultural shifts within music studies and society at large since its publication, some of the questions and issues raised in Ramsey's significant scholarly essay continue to pierce the veil of the neoliberal multiculturalism that remains pervasive over twenty years later within our fields and institutions, where Black and other marginalized people remain in the minority and the minoritized, while their lives and creative practices are taken up as objects of study. Because there are so many trenchant points in this essay that continue to resonate within our current discourse, I would like to comment on a few of Ramsey's statements to emphasize the present importance of his past queries in the discourses, fields, and institutions of American music.“Do you hear me, though?” is a Black vernacular phrase that might be employed for rhetorical emphasis, and not necessarily because what was said was not actually heard. But I ask the question literally and rhetorically on behalf of Ramsey, because current trends in the field of American music studies (especially with the increase in the study of Black music of all genres, particularly hip-hop and now classical composers) demonstrate that some of the most pertinent questions raised in “Who Hears Here?” remain mostly unanswered.3 Or, as Ramsey asked: “How could I abide what could only be called antiblackness even as the field increasingly allowed Black musical topics into its array of ‘legitimate’ research topics?”4 Regarding the meaning of his question, “who hears here?,” Ramsey notes the following: More than creating place for my own voice in the field, the query “who hears here?” invites us all to consider our backgrounds and identifications when writing about a music tradition in which power relationships have been a persistent underlying theme. Riggs expressed my attitude toward the field concisely: “Do you honestly think you can so closely . . . [and] critically examine me without studying or revealing yourself?”5Considering the reference above to groundbreaking Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs within the introduction to Who Hears Here?, Ramsey's “godfather” status does not take on the traditional patriarchal tone often implicit within the role. As a scholar and human, he continues to allow himself to be pushed to deconstruct his own position within the structures of patriarchy, while allowing his work to be shaped by Black feminists, as well as considering queer relations and experiences in his analysis. In this statement, Ramsey raises two questions that I'd like to emphasize throughout the remainder of this brief essay: 1) How might we consider our own backgrounds and identifications when writing about music (and its inherent power relations)? and 2) What does the selection of and approach to studying Black music, people, and culture reveal about oneself? While these questions might be considered polarizing or alienating to some in majoritized positions, or appear as though they prevent an “objective analysis” of “the music itself” (which, as Ramsey demonstrates in his essay under consideration, is not actually possible),6 they invite us to deal with the prickly nature of engaging with the music and cultural creations of a people who have suffered centuries of racial violence under slavery, Jim Crow, and current regimes of racist violence in this country, as well as a commercial music industry birthed out of exploitation (i.e., blackface minstrelsy).Ramsey reminds us that posing such questions and observations challenges the status quo within a white-dominant field of study, and as a result, has suggested that his approach has led some colleagues to assume that he believes he can “speak about African American music with more authority simply because [he] was black and working on African American music.”7 This charge of “racial essentialism” is one that has been assigned to many Black scholars who emerged out of the Black Arts and Power movements, as they took up Black topics in ways that did not adhere to the positivist, seemingly objective standards established by mostly white scholars in the academy at the time.8 Racial essentialism (mostly directed toward Black and other scholars of color and rarely white ones) has also been a specific debate within music studies.9 Yet what is often left out of these controversies is the naturalized position of whiteness within society, the academy, and academic thought: “Because all the fields of musical studies are overwhelmingly made up of white scholars, we can observe an unconscious interpretive pattern even in research on black music. The white ‘vernacular’ is ‘understood’ as always-already present and therefore requires little explanation, theoretical or otherwise.”10 Joshua Myers's invocation of June Jordan in the Introduction to On Black Study is relevant here: “It is not that we believe only Black people can understand the Black experience. It is, rather, we acknowledge the difference between reality and criticism as the difference between Host and Parasite.”11 The notion of a “white epistemology” (or mode of knowledge-making and production rooted in Enlightenment-based, Eurocentric notions of what is true and factual shaped by mostly white male thinkers) has been taken up in other fields of study, but music studies has been slow to reckon with this idea until fairly recently.12 Ramsey's observation that the white “vernacular . . . requires little explanation, theoretical or otherwise” broached this topic over two decades ago, and attempts to “denaturalize” race (or, specifically, to undo the cultural specificity with which Black scholars were approaching the study of Black music) persists in the study of Black music within the academy.13 With the inclusion of more Black and other nonwhite subjects into the discourse of music studies and into classes to meet the needs and demands of students across higher education today, how does one's own positionality and identity shape the decision to take up Black people and their music as objects of study and teaching? How does that positionality fit within dominant discourse steeped in legacies of white supremacy, and how does one undo these legacies as they take up such topics from a position of inherent (racial) power? As Ramsey warns us, “If we undertake this important project together, all this revelation will no doubt carry with it some uncomfortable moments.”14The “uncomfortable moments” are part of what it means to do the difficult work of interrogating one's own place within society and the academy when studying the music of a people who have laid the foundation for American popular music (and contributed significantly to nonpopular music, too), even while being (violently) marginalized and minoritized for centuries after being forcefully brought to this country as enslaved laborers. It is especially necessary to get comfortable being uncomfortable as a practice when what is at stake today is severe: we are living in a country where affirmative action has been deemed illegal by the highest court (as it has been constructed in the popular and racist imagination to benefit African Americans, although it has been proven to benefit white women the most15), draconian laws are being passed in states banning the teaching of Black, Indigenous, and other non-whitewashed histories that do not present the United States or whiteness favorably under the banners of “anti-woke” and “anti-Critical Race Theory” laws (regardless of the historical record), the ability for people of non-normative genders and sexualities to simply exist is being met regularly with violence (both legally and in everyday experiences), and abortion bans are sweeping the nation.In his recommendation to attend to one's own positionality within their scholarly work on Black music, Ramsey specifies that he is “not advocating that white (or black) scholars present autobiographical detail as a matter of course in black music research; sometimes that information is not relevant to a specific project. But in work that seems pressed to deconstruct and decode African American identity and its politics, white and, no doubt, black scholars’ claims of access to such sensibilities need to be theorized more often and rigorously.”16 Ramsey's care for Black people's diverse lives in the study of Black music informs how I have developed my own work, and specifically the concept of Blacksound. As a Black scholar who studies the music of Black people (or any community of people, for that matter), I do not feel I am exempt from interrogating my own positionality. Even though I do not explicitly discuss my relationship to being Black within my current work on Blacksound, it is nonetheless evident in the deployment and construction of the concept itself.17 I cannot ethically (from my own perspective) study the music of Black people and topics related to antiblackness and racism without being in community with Black people and working toward our collective liberation from systems of exploitation, violence, and erasure. I do not read Black culture and life from the limited binary of oppression and resistance, because my methodological and overall scholarly approach to studying the music of Black people (and how it becomes absorbed into commercial music and its industry) requires that I deal with the complexity of Black life, not the scripted narrative of Black existence that has been constructed within American culture since slavery. I find it even more difficult to talk about Black life and experience in my scholarship without considering my own specificity within that collective, and how my positionality shapes both my reading practices and the potential to gain professional status from doing this work within the structures that treat even academic work and ideas as commodities. I agree with Joy James: “That is the most beautiful thing about the academy, that whatever skills you acquire, you can redirect some to help people in ways that do not reproduce the cage.”18To extend Ramsey's pertinent question of “Who Hears Here?,” I ask: What is your relationship to Black people and Black liberation (or any marginalized group you choose to study to which you do not belong)? How do you pursue a career on these topics and not reinforce the racist structures that provide access to theorizing about Black life without having to experience being Black in the first place? Are you simply citing the latest and most popular theories on race and Blackness in your work so that you appear to have stayed on top of the discourse, or are you deeply engaging with the work of Black and other marginalized scholars to better understand how race and racism shape their experiences, especially in relation to the construction of whiteness and white supremacy? How does your own positionality, particularly a deconstruction of whiteness (and patriarchy, homophobia, ableism, classism, and so on), factor into your personal and intellectual relationship with the work—in your methodologies, as well as in your overall approach to engaging with the music of Black people? How do you redistribute (or forfeit) the power resources and status you might gain from your scholarly engagement with Black culture with Black communities? Why are you doing this work? These are difficult questions, but ones that should be addressed if the goal is not simply to capitalize professionally and control the narrative of the lives and creative work of Black people through academic discourses and institutions.I was given sage advice from an editor during graduate school to never allow a quotation to stand in for your own words or ideas, but I believe this concluding moment is one in which Ramsey's words best summarize what is at stake when we consider who gets to tell the stories of Black culture and theorize concerning Black life within the academic study and teaching of music: We will never attain these ideals within the realm of black music studies . . . without interracial cooperation. And that cannot be achieved without dramatic increase in the number of highly trained black scholars who have been there and know there. And, of course, there is no single black “there.” As black music research continues to cut the academic rug with its paradigm shift, we will need many more black scholars on the dance floor, saying it loud and intensively taking it to the bridge. Without African American critical perspectives we remain trapped in a familiar pattern, one in which “black culture is more easily intellectualized (and canonized) when transferred from the danger of lived black experience to the safety of white metaphor, when you can have the ‘signifying black difference’ without the difference of significant blackness.”19

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.