The politics and aesthetics of creative music : a Rancièrian encounter with the AACM

Abstract

Jacques Rancière is a thinker whose work has, over the past half-century, exerted increasing influence on wide range of discourses, including those of pedagogy, politics, literature, cinema and curatorship. This thesis comprises the lengthiest and most thorough treatment of his thought to date in a growing body of musicological work following his thought. Despite the breadth of Rancière’s oeuvre, music is a subject upon which he has rarely alighted, and his work in other fields provides no obviously applicable method for its study. In order to follow his work onto a novel territory, this thesis examines the model of equality at the centre of his thought, and his main conceptual frameworks and their relevance to the study of music. Principal among these are his ‘distributions of the sensible’ and their manifestations in the binary of politics and police logics and the regimes of the identification of art. In extrapolating the consequences of Rancière’s equality and the specific polemical interventions to which he puts it, the implications for the musicological disciplinarity of his method is reflected upon. The methods and approaches developed by such study of Rancière’s work are then turned to study of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians [AACM], a musicians’ organisation formed in Chicago in 1965. The AACM’s rooting in a politics of Blackness necessitates a critical appraisal of Rancière’s formulations of politics, which have often been considered antagonistic to politics rooted in conceptions of identity. The AACM is studied through the interrelation of the aesthetics of its politics and the politics of its aesthetics, deploying Rancière’s problematic to articulate the various registers on which they are linked. In so doing, this study renews and revises Rancière’s conceptual apparatuses and evinces the complexity of aesthetico-political entanglements in the Black music-making of the AACM.