Cultivating Activist Lives in Sound
T ara R o d g e rs
The author discusses political dimensions of electronic music singing a requiem for Michael Brown, the unarmed Black
ABSTRACT
and sound cultures in the historical present, critiques various teenager killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police of-
ways that neoliberalism inflects and constrains creative practice,
ficer [4]. I write this essay with artists, arts educators and arts
and outlines cultural and political aspirations that sonic activists
might pursue. collectives in mind, with the assumption that art is inherently
political in the many ways that it modulates, and is modu-
lated by, relations of power. At the same time, I argue that
An activist life in sound [1] cuts across various realms, such feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist political activisms are nec-
as the social structures and modes of time and feeling that essary for the survival of artistic expression as the province
make creativity possible, the communication networks and of all people, rather than only a privileged few.
means of music production and distribution that articulate
individual efforts to collective consciousness, and the eco- Inhabiting the Historical Present
logical impacts of electronic technologies. The propagation The historical present in electronic music and sound cul-
of sound waves across space and time is a useful metaphor tures is full of contradiction. Some progress has been made
for thinking about relations of individuals and collectives: on the question of gender. Books such as Pink Noises and
consider a sonic-political act at the center, with its ripple ef- Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening are showing up on course
fects as the various social, political-economic and ecological syllabi, and community-based projects such as Bonnie Jones
impacts that resonate from that act locally and in more far- and Suzanne Thorpe’s Techne initiative and the Women’s
reaching scales. Myriad acts overlap, while collective social Audio Mission are changing the ways that electronic mu-
organization enables multiple sonic-political acts to be am- sic composition, audio engineering and sound histories are
plified or rendered more powerful. As Doris Sommer asserts taught in university classrooms and community workshops
with regard to the civic value of the arts and humanities: [5–8]. And yet some of the same problems that existed in
“All of us would do well to consider art’s ripple effects, from electronic music and sound cultures decades ago persist,
producing pleasure to triggering innovation” [2]. from the lack of gender and racial diversity in music and
Sonic-political acts that generate ripple effects may en- technology classrooms (in terms of both students enrolled
compass various forms and practices of doing, researching and artists discussed) to concomitant disparities in profes-
or advocating creative work in sound or music. Or, they may sional opportunities and pay. The Female Pressure collective
be composed of more explicitly political actions that em- has launched important efforts to document the widespread
ploy sonic metaphors or aural performances, such as when marginalization of women on electronic music festival line-
Occupy protesters innovated the “human microphone” to ups and record labels with statistics and infographics and to
amplify public speech [3] or when activists interrupted the organize collectively voiced calls to action [9].
bourgeois comfort of a St. Louis Symphony performance by What is behind this one-step-forward, two-steps-back
progression? First, deeply entrenched patriarchal histories
of music, technology and creativity make structural change
Tara Rodgers (composer, historian, critic). Email: <[email protected]>. in the present difficult to achieve. In my research on the his-
Website: <analogtara.net>.
tory of synthesizers, for example, I draw upon feminist schol-
An earlier version of this essay was presented as a keynote lecture at the second
“Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism” conference held at the London College of
arship in the history and philosophy of science, which has
Communication, London, U.K., in October 2014. shown how Western technoscientific discourses align with
See <mitpressjournals.org/toc/lmj/-/25> for audio, video and other supplementary Judeo-Christian narratives of creation and salvation and how
files associated with this issue of LMJ.
the subject of science is normatively white, Western and male
©2015 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 25, pp. 79–83, 2015 79
[10]. This alignment manifests in audio-technical discourses an operation of power [14]. In the context of institutions and
when the male composer or audio technologist assumes a technological platforms that are oriented toward profit and
kindred subject position to that of a creator/God—a seem- sustained by the production of inequalities, as Lorde pointed
ingly natural inheritance from foundational, gendered and out, “our feelings were not meant to survive” [15]. So, to advo-
imperialist creation myths in Western history and culture. cate art-making and arts education is to advocate the survival
Race-based expectations operate in tandem with gendered of feelings, their radical and diverse expressions, and their
assumptions about creative authority and technical skills, and proliferating translations into social action.
with sexualized assumptions about bodies in performance.
Overall, the very notion of who is legible as a “creator,” an “in- Critiquing Digital Cultures
novator,” a “composer,” a “producer” or an “experimental mu- I want to unpack certain media rituals that have become fa-
sician” in the present is up against longstanding mythologies miliar in the day-to-day work of many artists and cultural
that articulate socially and culturally differentiated bodies producers at this moment—to cultivate what Cynthia Enloe
and subjects to particular social roles and expectations [11]. has called a “feminist curiosity” that exposes and critiques
Second, neoliberal forces are bearing down on artists and ideologies that support everyday norms [16]. I am especially
arts organizations in strikingly difficult ways. Arts education interested in accounting for how technological platforms that
and arts programming are profoundly underfunded. Argu- are presented as neutral or, at least, inevitable choices for
ably more devastating, and harder to quantify, is the erosion artists and arts professionals are both problematic and not
of creative spirit and capacity that occurs when freedom of the only available options. We are intimately familiar with
artistic expression is relegated to the sphere of free-market implicit expectations that artists and arts organizations will
economies and hitched to profit-minded notions of entrepre- brand and market themselves, fundraise for their projects
neurialism. We need to meet and counter these trends with a by crowdfunding (tapping into their social networks) with
sense of urgency in our local communities as well as through tools such as Kickstarter, and sell their work directly to the
the strength of international networks. public—or, more commonly, distribute much of it for free
through online platforms such as SoundCloud and YouTube.
Sustaining Creativity These practices are not necessarily all bad; nonetheless, it is
What conditions make it possible to do creative work in timely to reflect on the structural and political dimensions
sound and music at this moment in the twenty-first century? of our complicity with these trends.
“Artistic subjectivity and aesthetic labor . . . in the digital age” Web 2.0, the now-familiar structure of the World Wide
[12] unfold in the long shadow of neoliberalism. This set of Web that emphasizes user-generated content and interactiv-
values includes the privatization of public institutions and ity, is an economy that relies on the unpaid labor of users
services, deregulated free-market competition, a generally who are also producers of content, as well as on the affective
upward drift of resources to the privileged few, and increased labor of distributed social networks to “like,” “share,” com-
individual responsibility for employment, health and over- ment on and otherwise hierarchize and circulate that con-
all welfare. Public funding for the arts has been decimated, tent. For artists, for whom art-making likely already unfolds
and jobs in affinity areas such as higher education are few in “spare time” outside other employment, this economy
and ever more precarious. The draining of support for arts demands increasing time for acquiring and cultivating the
education in public schools at all levels positions the arts as skills necessary to maintain an online presence and for do-
a superfluous indulgence that cannot be accommodated in ing the continual work of scanning, making and uploading
tough economic times, while a narrow focus on quantifi- media assets to serve a perceived need. To be sure, many
able outcomes and STEM (science, technology, engineering of us have embraced this work as a welcome dimension of
and mathematics) fields in higher education is deemed most our creative process, and we benefit from learning from one
prudent. A 1977 essay by Audre Lorde is prophetic on this another via social media networks and from expanding the
subject. Claiming poetry’s usefulness in accounting for Black audience for our work to new communities online. At the
women’s lives within a Eurocentric, white-supremacist and same time, the clear, material beneficiaries of our time and
patriarchal culture, Lorde wrote: “Poetry is not a luxury. It labor are large corporations such as Facebook and Google
is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of that acquire rich troves of data and freely supplied content
the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams from our use of their platforms. Another corollary of this
toward survival and change, first made into language, then “prosumerism” or “produserism” (i.e. when users become
into idea, then into more tangible action” [13]. Without di- producers of the content they consume) is that it partici-
minishing the powerful specificity of Lorde’s intervention in pates in a larger economy that has rendered interconnected
its original time and context, I argue for the clarion resonance occupations and public services obsolete over time. From
of her words in relation to artistic and activist lives today— the museum guide who has been displaced by download-
especially for those for whom creativity is an absolute lifeline able audio files, to the skilled graphic designer whose work
for excavation of, and testimony to, the felt effects of racism, now seems too expensive if we can do a halfway decent job
sexism, classism and other interlocking modes of oppression. ourselves, to the small record labels whose relevance has been
The suppression of feelings—even sometimes their partial diminished amid the dominant online distribution networks,
dilution into “like” and “share” gestures on social media—is neoliberal social organization tends to encourage and reward
80 Rodgers, Cultivating Activist Lives in Sound
competition among individuals at the expense of a more ro- gies, practices and timeframes for producing work that are
bust and egalitarian community structure [17]. in fact deeply in service of capitalism. To be clear, I am not
A quality of inevitability makes the contours of digital cul- advocating for wholesale abandonment of social media and
tures very hard to challenge. An example is the widespread other new technologies, but rather for critical consciousness
enthusiasm for “freely available” Web content. Under what of their political dimensions and for the avid exploration and
conditions might artists support offering content for free or invention of novel, better, community-based alternatives.
pursue alternatives? On the one hand, knowledge sharing
and open access to information are crucial educational and Collective Alternatives
political initiatives that we need to figure out how to do in The expansion of networks that make artists’ lives and work
better ways. On the other, content creators need to be paid sustainable through the collective distribution of knowledge
for their work and we need not groom future generations to and resources is the antithesis of an individual-centered,
expect that creative labor will always be provided for free. competitive-market, entrepreneurial culture. What would
Organizations such as Working Artists and the Greater happen if large, brave, brilliant groups of artists flatly refused
Economy (W.A.G.E.), and Canadian Artists’ Representation/ to distribute their work freely through existing channels and
Le Front des artistes canadiens (CARFAC) offer resources created new, collectively owned online distribution networks
such as cumulative statistics on artistic labor that is done for and/or novel modes of, say, handcrafting or hand-wrapping
free, as well as proposed rates of pay for various roles and sound and music objects, calling attention to this innovation
tasks in the arts [18–19]. These are helpful starting points by sheer means of its countercultural stance? There is little to
for artists negotiating pay for themselves and for curators lose in pursuing such alternatives: the value of digital music
lobbying institutions about payment for visiting artists. We downloads to most independent artists is effectively nil, and
need to push back on this expectation of free or low-paid fees for performances and exhibitions not much better. There
creative labor each time we have an opportunity to do so, are certainly some who have begun to innovate in these ways.
raising it for public debate and collective advocacy rather For example, the new wave of “boutique” synthesizer and ef-
than letting compensation issues get buried within the realm fects-pedal designers represent a kind of reaction against the
of individual negotiations. dominance of multinational corporations in mass-producing
If artists must compete in a marketplace with a glut of electronic music instruments in the 1980s and 1990s.
freely available online content, what are the implications for Artists might ask: How can we redistribute money to sup-
the work that they will and will not make? Thet Shein Win port our friends and colleagues if none of us has any funding
raises key concerns about this issue, asking: “If the [online] and no one wants to pay for music? It is worth examining
marketplace [is] the hub” that determines the success of a what small amounts of money we might personally con-
work—for example, by whether it “goes viral” (a phenom- tribute to the arts and where that money can best be spent,
enon that we know is contingent on proprietary algorithms), and, if fundraising for a project, seek approaches that are
is successfully crowdfunded or is shown to be viable by Web consistent with one’s politics. Josh MacPhee points out that
analytics—“what projects will forever remain on the table Kickstarter, and its financial partner Amazon, take 10% off
or in the studio?” [20] There are also temporal pressures on the top of funds raised from projects that meet their goals.
creative output, given expectations that new content will There are also less well-quantified costs shared by artists and
be continuously available. I joke that every time I log into their networks, of gifts donated as fundraising perks, pro-
my Facebook account, it reprimands me that “Pink Noises motional expenses and hours of labor that are invested to
fans haven’t heard from you in 14 days!” But art and criti- make campaigns successful [24]. Whenever possible, we can
cal thought take time. The performance artist Penny Arcade be more mindful consumers in deciding where to invest even
recently addressed this phenomenon, urging young artists very small sums in the arts, and to deliberately and directly
not to succumb to external notions of “success,” but rather to support other artists [25]. A useful analogy can be made to
“honor [their] own trajectory” and rededicate themselves to the local food movement: going to a farmers’ market rather
the long “developmental arc” that constitutes an artistic life than a chain store, and other small changes of habit among
and career [21]. The science fiction author Ursula Le Guin those with the means to make such choices, can make a big
likewise has observed that now more than ever we need writ- difference over time if adopted on a widespread scale. Artists
ers and artists “who can see alternatives to how we live now, might also organize music production collectives that pool
and . . . who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the instruments and tools for sharing among the community.
realists of a larger reality” [22]. My position (and provoca- Open-source software solutions are promising in this regard.
tion) is that artists have an expansive mandate in the arenas Some of these approaches also offer ways to reduce electron-
of aesthetics and politics to depict and bear witness to the ics waste, running counter to dominant ideologies of planned
social, cultural, political and economic systems and times obsolescence and individual ownership of electronic devices.
in which they are enmeshed—in Adrienne Rich’s words, “to
Aspirations and Actions
be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding
us that the democratic project is never-ending” [23]. Art- As is the case with other forms of activism, an activist life
ists’ capacity to fully inhabit this crucial social role can be in sound must be made and remade through adaptive and
compromised if there is noncritical acceptance of technolo- renewable commitments to social justice. What might sonic
Rodgers, Cultivating Activist Lives in Sound 81
activists work toward? It can help to name some values and This list is designed for ongoing revision and to motivate
aspirations. I start with the following: artists to make their own. It emerges from my particular geo-
political and social location, and it is not intended to be com-
1. That people have the resources and time to pursue
prehensive, universal or prescriptive. While it has a utopic
creative sonic or musical expression in ways that
feel, it is also generative, like an instructional score: there
are unrestricted by gender identity, race, ethnicity,
are many possible ways to interpret it and turn the stated
class position, sexuality, physical ability, age and
aspirations into actions. A single project might zero in on
other socially differentiating factors. This goal needs
one area of the list very well: for example, Pauline Oliveros
to be bolstered by a broad array of social services
and collaborators’ Adaptive Use Musical Instruments project
(e.g. access to education, employment, healthcare
implements the goal of expanding access to music-making
and family care), as well as through opposition to
to people with physical disabilities [26]. Or, an artist’s entire
mass incarceration and militarization.
career or the mission of an organization might focus on one
2. That such unrestricted creative sonic expressions
area, such as an ecologically minded composer’s ongoing
foster:
uses of sound to raise consciousness about environmental
• diversity of individual expressions
sustainability; a music educator’s lifelong project to teach
• senses of community or belonging
younger generations about art’s inherent values and mean-
• recognition of differences without insistence
ings; or an antipoverty nonprofit’s efforts to improve mate-
on their resolution or appropriation by those in
rial living conditions for many, which can increase capacity
positions of power
for creative expression among a wider range of community
• shared commitments to eradicating socioeconomic
members. Alternatively, a sonic activist might endeavor to
inequalities
do a small action in support of most or all of the above as-
• consciousness of social and environmental
pirations each day. For me, this list is a useful compass and
interdependency
practical guide, so that I can routinely ask myself: In what
3. That creative lives in sound are personally and
ways does my music-making today address X? How does
economically sustainable, through:
my research further Y? If I’m not doing enough to support
• collective organization and/or ownership of the
Z, what needs to change? It reveals how there can indeed be
means of music production and distribution
many approaches to cultivating an activist life in sound—
• societal recognition of art’s inherent cultural,
many areas toward which we can direct our efforts—resulting
economic and civic value
in a proliferation of sonic-political acts that have local and
4. That detrimental environmental impacts resulting
far-reaching ripple effects.
from creative uses of electronics and audio tech
nologies are minimized.
Acknowledgments 5 Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2010).
Thanks to conference organizers Angus Carlyle, Holly Ingleton and
Cathy Lane, and to the attendees of the second “Sound::Gender:: 6 Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Practice (New York:
Feminism::Activism” conference events, for their invitation and discus- iUniverse, 2005).
sion of this work.
7 Techne: Modular Workshops in Music, Technology & Improvisation:
<technesound.org/> (accessed 1 January 2015).
References and Notes
8 Women’s Audio Mission (WAM): <https://www.womensaudiomis
1 This essay addresses the organizing question of the 2014 “Sound:: sion.org> (accessed 1 January 2015).
Gender::Feminism::Activism” conference: “What, in the historical
present, might constitute an activist life in sound?” As indicated by 9 “Female Pressure Facts,” 2013: <www.femalepressure.net/PDFs/fem
the references, the essay is based on interdisciplinary research that pressreport-03-2013.pdf> (accessed 1 January 2015)
centers on arts and cultural contexts in the U.S., Canada and the
U.K.; while the arguments may be relevant in other contexts, they 10 Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
emerge from and critique these cultural locations in particular. Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies
14, No. 3, 575–599 (1988); Luce Irigaray, “Is the Subject of Science
2 Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Sexed?” Hypatia 2, No. 3, 65–87 (1987); and Tara Rodgers, “Synthesiz-
Humanities (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2014) p. 3. ing Sound: Metaphor in Audio-Technical Discourse and Synthesis
History,” Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 2011.
3 Lilian Radovac, “Mic Check: Occupy Wall Street and the Space of
Audition,” in Jack Bratich, ed., Occupy Communication and Culture, 11 See Tara Rodgers, “ ‘What, for Me, Constitutes Life in a Sound?’:
special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11, No. Electronic Sounds as Lively and Differentiated Individuals,” in Kara
1, 34–41 (2014). Keeling and Josh Kun, eds. Sound Clash: Listening to American Stud-
ies, special issue of American Quarterly 63, No. 3, 509–530 (2011);
4 Robert Samuels, “Protesters Interrupt St. Louis Symphony with ‘Re- and George E. Lewis, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and
quiem for Mike Brown,’ ” Washington Post, 5 October 2014: <www. Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal 16, No. 1,
washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/10/05/protesters- 91–122 (1996).
interrupt-st-louis-symphony-with-requiem-for-mike-brown/> (ac-
cessed 1 January 2015). 12 Thet Shein Win, “Marketing the Entrepreneurial Artist in the Inno-
82 Rodgers, Cultivating Activist Lives in Sound
vation Age: Aesthetic Labor, Artistic Subjectivity, and the Creative 22 Quoted in Rachel Arons, “ ‘We Will Need Writers who Can Remem-
Industries,” Anthropology of Work Review 35, No. 1 (2014) p. 2. ber Freedom’: Ursula Le Guin and Last Night’s N.B.A.s,” New Yorker
(20 November 2014): <www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
13 Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1977), in Sister Outsider national-book-awards-ursula-le-guin> (accessed 1 January 2015).
(Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007) p. 37.
23 Adrienne Rich, “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts”
14 See Jonathan Sterne, “What if Interactivity Is the New Passivity?” (3 July 1997), Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New
FlowTV.org 15, No. 10 (2012): <flowtv.org/2012/04/the-new-passiv York: Norton, 2001) p. 105.
ity/> (accessed 1 January 2015); and RobtheIdealist, “Are You Tired
of the Social Justice Outrage Machine?” Orchestrated Pulse (2014): 24 Josh MacPhee, “Who’s the Shop Steward on your Kickstarter?” The
<www.orchestratedpulse.com/2014/01/tired-social-justice-outrage- Baffler 21 (2012): <www.thebaffler.com/articles/whos-the-shop-
machine/> (accessed 1 January 2015). steward-on-your-kickstarter> (accessed 1 January 2015).
15 Lorde [13] p. 39. 25 See Austin Thomas, essay in Sharon Louden, ed., Living and Sustain-
ing a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists (Chicago, IL: Univ.
16 Cynthia Enloe, “Introduction: Being Curious about Our Lack of of Chicago Press, 2013) pp. 31–34.
Feminist Curiosity,” in The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women
in a New Age of Empire (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004) 26 Deep Listening Institute, “Adaptive Use Musical Instruments
pp. 1–8. (AUMI)”: <deeplistening.org/site/adaptiveuse> (accessed 1 January
2015).
17 See Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and T.L. Cowan and Jasmine Rault,
“The Labour of Being Studied in a Free Love Economy,” Ephemera: Manuscript received 2 January 2015.
Theory and Politics in Organization 14, No. 3, 473–490 (2014).
18 Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.): <www.wage
Tara Rodgers is a composer, historian and critic of elec-
forwork.com/> (accessed 1 January 2015).
tronic music and sound. She is the author of numerous essays
19 Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens on music, technology and culture and of Pink Noises: Women
(CARFAC): <www.carfac.ca/> (accessed 1 January 2015).
on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke Univ. Press, 2010), a
20 Thet Shein Win [12] p. 9. collection of interviews that won the 2011 Pauline Alderman
21 Penny Arcade, “Letter to a Young Artist #1” (2014): <pennyarcade. Book Award from the International Alliance for Women in
tv/letter-to-a-young-artist-1/> (accessed 1 January 2015). Music. See <www.analogtara.net>.
Rodgers, Cultivating Activist Lives in Sound 83
