Martyn Hudson, Newcastle University
As a ‘lover of music’ or what Antoine Hennion calls an
‘amateur’ I am constantly aware of the multiple meanings of the music I love.
Vinyl favourites on the deck at the moment include the first This Mortal Coil
EP, Luciano Berio’s Visage for voice
and magnetic tape, the first Einsturzende Neubaten compilation, Beat the Retreat from Test Dept, Michael
Tippett’s third symphony, and The Loving
Kind from Girls Aloud. I am a huge fan of musical artists like Richard
Skelton, with a substantial academic piece on his work coming out early next
year, and I have recently completed a study of the musical sociology of Luciano
Berio. I have a book forthcoming from Ashgate on the memory and sonority of
slave ships and have recently completed an academic piece on ideas about
‘listening’ in the work of Jean Luc Nancy. I’ve also written elsewhere of my
firm intention to conduct a choral version of Trumpton Riots by Half Man Half Biscuit. I love the Cardiacs and
the Blue Nile. This is to give you some sense of me as a ‘listener’. But what
exactly is this stuff I am listening to?
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council I was
part of the Northumbrian Exchanges
project at Newcastle University and we hope this project will continue in new
ways. With my collaborators Julie Crawshaw and Frances Rowe we examined multiple
circulations of Knowledge Exchange around the arts in rural Northumberland. My
strand was to develop ethnographies and interviews with composers and
musicians, to look at a variety of commissions and to think seriously about
what sound and music meant in that landscape – a landscape made even more
beautiful by the wonderful music of Kathryn Tickell who was a co-investigator
on the project. From supporting the development of Ceilidh bands in rural
communities, to supporting music in schools and at festivals, and working
through the implications of working within different musical traditions in the
landscape I think the project was a success. Most resonant for me were the
three commissions by the sound artist Tim Shaw, the classical composer Matthew
Rowan, and the traditional musician Shona Mooney. It was also linked to the
superb Landscape Quartet project of
Bennett Hogg and his collaborators and to the workshops, both practical and
theoretical, of Jamie Savan. The project was led by Professor Eric Cross, a
well-known conductor and the Dean of Cultural Affairs at Newcastle as part of
the new Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice.
I am a sociologist so to understand knowledge exchange in
rural Northumberland my first task was to try and ‘do a sociology of music’.
The paper, now published in Sociological Research Online, is my attempt to
think through the question of whether a sociology of music is at all possible.
It seemed to me that the sociologists thought yes, and the musicians thought it
was a much more problematic enterprise. The attempt to track the traces of
social relations in music has been a staple of the sociology of music. It has
been corrected over recent years by the hugely valuable work of Tia DeNora and
her collaborators in their attempt to understand the social powers and effects
of music or in the work of Hennion and his research into mediation and the
socialities around music. For me, addressing the artefacts and the processes of
music as I did, the more I listened the less I understood. Certainly I was able
to examine some aspects of social meaning in music of course: society is
represented through music. But to see music as a semiotic system that one can
somehow ‘listen through’ to hear social relations expressed not only didn’t address
the reality of music but somehow evaded it. So this article is a problem piece
where you can listen to my thoughts on this develop essentially in support of
what George Steiner calls the ‘radical untranslatability’ of music or at least
that attempts at translation are extremely problematic.
I wanted to think about this question of translation by
thinking about sound art although I am conscious that I was limited in scope in
thinking about this and rely on the definitions provided by Alan Licht. There
is a lot more work to develop from this and more recently I have been working
with the sound artist Tim Shaw to think in more depth about the artefactuality
and materiality of sound art. I also have to say that it was conversations with
Bennett Hogg, composer and cultural theorist, that excited me about the
potential to do a ‘sociology of sound’. My reading of Jean Luc Nancy also made
me question the whole idea of social representation and sound by refocusing my
attention to the sounds themselves as sonorities rather than what they ‘meant’
or displayed. The practice of sound art still holds my attention, particularly
how it is structured in space, but also because the attention to listening and
sound can raise questions of ‘alternative modernities’ and different ways of
thinking about the world and the sociological tradition within which we situate
our sociological practice. Further, it raises really significant questions
about knowledge, data, evidence, sociological objects, method and attendance to
small, often quite microscopic, processes.
Part of my ongoing concerns lie in the continuing relation
between arts and social-scientific practice. I think we need to think urgently
about questions of co-production and co-curation, of working within arts
communities and agencies, understanding the ‘work’ of art as Julie Crawshaw
often puts it to me. It also means understanding the landscapes within which
those practices are situated and the kinds of sociology and philosophy that can
help us understand the multiple circulations of knowledge out there in
communities. It is about what we might call ‘omni-disciplinarity’ whilst still
keeping a sense of our discipline as sociologists. It also means questioning
the ongoing relationship between the ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ worlds and how we
curate ‘collections’ of sound and music in archives and out there in the world.
Recently a friend and I spent a whole morning ‘curating’ our top 5 songs to
display through facebook. It was agony. My friend Paul said that he felt he was
letting down and abandoning all those songs that were being left off the list.
We know that this stuff is full of social meaning but let’s not translate,
let’s just listen and see what happens.
