Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies

Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening is a treatise on how to approach, engage with, and listen to/with Indigenous ways of knowing. One major premise is simple: musical undertakings that involve Indigenous musics and/or musicians have reified and continue to reify colonizing power structures. Nevertheless, what he offers in response is complex and necessarily impartial, since no one answer exists. The decolonizing work remains in the hands (ears?) of scholars, composers, musicians, music critics, and audiences as they grapple with the varying contexts and functions for past and contemporary Indigenous music-making. More generally, such answers could apply to any rethinking of (Indigenous) art and knowledge production. Robinson’s threading of decolonizing approaches together with his analysis of several different musical settings presents a most provocative springboard.Robinson opens with Canadian composer Murray Schafer’s disparaging depiction of Inuit singing. For those fond of Schafer’s compositions and theoretical ponderings (after all, he did peg soundscape in sound studies), he jarringly, yet effectively, rips open assumptions running through past and recent encounters with Indigenous musics and musicians. Some are blatant, as in Schafer’s depiction; others are couched in good intentions, as in more recent performances in the name of Truth and Reconciliation. His introduction also provides his initial explanation of the hungry listening concept, a phrase creatively adopted from Halq’eméylem to convey the exploitive and selective manner in which Western (art) music is heard and created with formal-aesthetic properties at the forefront. Directly after, he enacts critical Indigenous studies use of refusal and writes to an Indigenous-only readership in a short section.The next two chapters further flesh out hungry listening as an orientation and explore writing about music through performative writing. Robinson’s point that Indigenous musics function in different ways than Western art music is nothing new, yet he also teases out the implications of ignoring such functions in terms of Indigenous sovereignty. Further, in tackling hungry listening as something that ideally should be resisted/refused, he begins to propose pathways for practical and structural change. Between them is an “Event Score,” these appearing throughout in brief interludes of poetic writing engaging places, the senses, and materiality.The bulk of his analyses of musical performances come in the next three chapters. Chapter 3 examines performances bringing early music (Western classical) together with Indigenous music and/or Indigenous musicians, albeit in different ways, while chapter 4 takes on the issue of songs collected by early ethnographers stored in museums. Such songs have been used repeatedly by Western art music composers, often encouraged by the ethnographers that collected them, with little to no regard to their Indigenous functions/meanings/contexts. Providing some egregious examples, Robinson also highlights varying approaches from Indigenous activist-artists in reviving and repatriating such songs and asks composers/music critics/listeners to consider their own responsibility when working with or writing about musics stemming from such collections. Directly after is “Event Score for Responsibility,” a playbook for how a composition inspired by Inuit singing might be enacted more critically and collaboratively. Chapter 5 then grippingly recounts Robinson’s spectator reactions to four specific musical performances, enacting his positionality through performative writing. Here he also tackles affect, whether collective affect is even a possibility, and ultimately asserts “fostering empathy” (232) is not enough to direct structural change.Robinson concludes by revisiting inclusionary and exclusionary approaches modeled after Indigenous multimedia artists for listening, creating, and collaborating. He then offers space to two (non-Indigenous) ethnomusicology scholars to ruminate on decolonial thinking and listening before ultimately offering his own conclusions. Hungry Listening, while sometimes difficult to wade through with its many interdisciplinary references and Halq’eméylem phrases, pushes readers—refusing to placate them.

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