Musical DemocracyState University of New York Press, 2012 M02 1 - 178 pages Musical metaphors abound in political theory and music often accompanies political movements, yet music is seldom regarded as political communication. In this groundbreaking book, Nancy S. Love explores how music functions as metaphor and model for democracy in the work of political theorists and activist musicians. She examines deliberative democratic theorists—Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls—who employ musical metaphors to express the sense of justice that animates their discourse ideals. These metaphors also invoke embodied voices that enter their public discourse only in translation, as rational arguments for legal rights. Love posits that the music of activists from the feminist and civil rights movements—Holly Near and Bernice Johnson Reagon—engages deeper, more fluid energies of civil society by modeling a democratic conversation toward which deliberative democrats' metaphors merely suggest. To omit movement music from politics is, Love argues, to refuse the challenges it poses to modern, rational, secular, Western democracy. In conclusion, Musical Democracy proposes that a more radical—and more musical—democracy would embrace the spirit of humanity which moves a politics dedicated to the pursuit of justice. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Rationalizing Resonance | 17 |
Orchestrating Consensus | 45 |
Singing For Our Lives | 67 |
Moving the Spirit | 87 |
6 Toward a More Musical Democracy | 109 |
Notes | 119 |
References | 135 |
Index | 157 |
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Common terms and phrases
According action aesthetic African African-American argues argument artistic associations audience become Bernice Johnson Black body calls Cambridge chapter citizens civil rights claims communication concept Connolly consensus context continues create critical cultural deliberative democrats democracy democratic describes develop discourse discussion distinction embodied example experience expression feeling feminist forms freedom Habermas Habermas’s Holly human ideal identities important individuals John justice language learned liberal limits listeners lives meaning metaphors moral move movement musicians oral orchestra original performance philosophical play political practices principles provides public discourse quoted rational Rawls Rawls’s reason Regarding resist responsibility reveal rhetoric Rock role says sense shared singing social social union society songs sound space speak specifically speech sphere spiritual structure style subjects suggests Sweet Honey symbolic symphony theory tion traditions translate understanding University Press vocal voice women’s women’s music writes York
Popular passages
Page 120 - The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.
Page 89 - They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days — Sorrow Songs — for they were weary at heart.
Page 38 - According to my conception, the philosopher ought to explain the moral point of view, and— as far as possible— justify the claim to universality of this explanation, showing why it does not merely reflect the moral intuitions of the average, male, middle-class member of a modern Western society.
Page 27 - The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and to defend them from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of the law, to a principle of sociation that is, for them, dysfunctional.
Page 32 - Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs.
Page 59 - This explains the propriety of the name "justice as fairness": it conveys the idea that the principles of justice are agreed to in an initial situation that is fair. The name does not mean that the concepts of justice and fairness are the same, any more than the phrase "poetry as metaphor" means that the concepts of poetry and metaphor are the same.
Page 3 - character" as a general term for whatever can be thought of as distinct (any thing, pattern, situation, structure, nature, person, object, act, role, process, event, etc.,) then we could say that metaphor tells us something about one character as considered from the point of view of another character. And to consider A from the point of view of B is, of course, to use B as a perspective upon A.
Page 36 - Civil society is composed of those more or less spontaneously emergent associations, organizations, and movements that, attuned to how societal problems resonate in the private life spheres, distill and transmit such reactions in amplified form to the public sphere.