Glocal Imaginaries and Musical Displacements in the Work of Richard Powers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Richard Powers' novel The Time of our Singing (2003), the relationship between the global and the local is located in the tension between two musical diasporas: European classical music and African-American jazz and hip-hop. The novel focuses on two biracial (African American and Jewish) brothers – Jonah a singer and Joseph a pianist – mobilizing biracial identity as a metaphor for cultural conflict between European and African American traditions. The novel persistently queries — particularly with regard to the United States post-1945 — whether black musicians working within the western classical tradition are displaced and subordinated within it, and whether they can successfully appropriate and revise that tradition in ways relevant to African American identity. The Time of Our Singing narrativizes, through representations of music and musical performance, ideas about racial identity and the degree to which it can be regarded as performative. I suggest that the novel, both thematically and structurally, points to musical mixing as a way of resolving cultural tension. The paper utilizes three concepts with musical connotations: contrary motion, musical miscegenation and musicologist Ronald Radano's concept of resonances (repetition with difference). It also draws on theories and accounts of biraciality (Zack, Root, Piper, Fundaberg, Romano), discourses about the relationship between the African American and Jewish communities in the USA (Goffman and Gilroy), and Paul Gilroy's work on music as a site where essentialist and non-essentialist concepts of race can meld.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".