Papers by Christabel Stirling
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social ... more This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs.
Contemporary Music Review, 2016
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men... more This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed, S. [2004]. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with making changes.
The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies
This thesis is a multi-sited ethnography of live music audiences in London. Drawing insight from ... more This thesis is a multi-sited ethnography of live music audiences in London. Drawing insight from four broadly defined field sites—classical music, sound art, dub reggae, and electronic/dance music—the thesis investigates the role of affect in the formation of musical and sonic publics. Music’s affective propensities refer to its ability to generate visceral states and adrenal surges that elude obvious discursive representation, and that often seem pre-conscious. The importance of these somatic feelings lies in their ‘public-making’ capacities: their ability to bind us to or separate us from others in ways that can transform or reinforce broader social relations. The central contribution of the thesis is that it advances new empirically grounded ways of understanding the workings and potentials of musical and sonic affect, offering insight into the social and affective processes by which music and sound generate collectivities, the extent to which such collectivities endure, evolve, or evaporate over time, and the opportunities they present for putting existing social orders into question. Above all, the thesis demonstrates through rich ethnographic and historical research how musically incited affect has to be analysed by reference to social, cultural, historical and political conditions. I show that affect, as it is engendered by music and sound, is an ambivalent mechanism, able to strengthen as well as challenge dominant social orders. On the basis of this ethnographic work, the thesis simultaneously develops a new theoretical framework to critique influential theories of affect derived from the humanities and social sciences that portray affect as pre-mediated and involuntary: as an emancipatory force operating autonomously from subjectivity and social identity. The thesis is thus committed to the generative effects of putting theory and empiricism in dialogue, employing a ‘post-positivist’ empiricist methodology (Born, 2010a) that moves constantly between speculative theory and historically informed ethnography. Arguing that an empirically grounded theorisation of affect is central to an understanding of musical and sonic experience, musical and sonic publics, and therefore also to a musical and sonic politics, the thesis acts as a rejoinder to theories of listening and live audiencing in musicology and sound studies, while also advancing several secondary themes that cut across the thesis as a whole. These themes include questions of genre and creativity, specifically the contingent relations between musical producers and their publics; music and community vis-à-vis wider critical discourses on community and inclusivity; theories of temporality and the aesthetic; and musical taste and social stratification. Finally, in the Conclusion, the thesis suggests possible new directions for thinking about the affective politics of music and sound, oriented around three logics: antagonism-agonism; community-collaboration; and emergence-divergence
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men... more This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed, S. [2004]) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with change.
This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social ... more This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs.
Conference Programmes by Christabel Stirling
The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city... more The aim of this conference is to explore space through music, approaching the history of the city via the notion of nostalgia. Often described as a form of homesickness, nostalgia is, by definition, the feeling that makes us wish to repossess or reoccupy a space. Such spaces appear to us as both near and distant, tangible and remote, and it seems that attempts at reclaiming them are frequently musical in nature. We know, for instance, that particular compositions have played important roles in helping people to navigate or mitigate a sense of displacement. In these circumstances, affective experiences may be bound up with trauma or joy, as is the case of song during wartime or musical imaginaries among migrants. Under other conditions, we might identify a ‘second-hand nostalgia’ in the guise of a musically-inflected tourism that seeks to reactivate (for pleasure and/or profit) the historical aura of an urban site. What are we to make of the abundance of personal, inter-personal, and propositional episodes that posit music as some kind of a bridge to the urban past?
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Papers by Christabel Stirling
Conference Programmes by Christabel Stirling